


Liar Liar: Coat of Arms

by Kenjiandco



Series: Liar Liar [2]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Blood, Crime AU, Domestic, Espionage, Established Relationship, Eventual Smut, Fluff and Smut, Gen, Gun Violence, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Kidnapping, M/M, Mistaken Identity, Ot3 au, Polyamory, Thriller, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-15
Updated: 2016-02-01
Packaged: 2018-03-01 13:23:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 49,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2774567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kenjiandco/pseuds/Kenjiandco
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In 1993, a three-year-old boy disappeared from the back of his parent's car in Busan, South Korea.</p><p>In 2015, a famous pianist who escaped North Korea disappears, after a cryptic email hints that his secret has been uncovered.  Two separate occurrences with no known connections.</p><p>But what should have been an in-an-out job becomes be the first link in a chain that runs all the way back to a kidnapping in South Korea...and the fate of a little boy with amber eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Conan-Doyle

**Author's Note:**

> Well, you guys wanted to know if Liar Liar was ever gonna have a plot? Here's your answer. Welcome to Coat of Arms.  
> A little explanation as to what I'm doing here: [The first Liar Liar fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2512346) started out as a series of vignettes on tumblr. It's extremely episodic and not all in chronological order, and not really well suited to a tighter storyline. Which is why we have the second fic in the series here, Coat of Arms. 
> 
> This story kicks off about 18 months after Marco's arrival in the US in the first chapter of Liar Liar, and we'll be takin' it novel style from there.
> 
> It's also kind of assuming you've read the shorts in Liar Liar itself so...go do that first probably, if you haven't.
> 
> Enjoy!

In the year and a half since he left New Zealand for north-central Minnesota, Marco doesn’t think he’s ever seen Levi _not_ look tired.  He looked even worse than usual when Marco opened the back door to the insistent knocking.  The fact that it was three in the morning was probably a contributing factor.

“Wake up Jean,” Levi said, brushing past Marco into the living room without bothering to take off his coat.  “I’ve got a hard drive for him to get intimate with.”

“What’s going on?” Marco asked softly, not moving from the doorway.  He’d learned from experience that Levi’s sense of priority isn’t always the greatest, and he wasn’t about to wake up Jean for some sketchy credit card charge or something.

Levi shot him a heavy-eyed glare, and then relented, collapsing back onto the sofa and scraping a hand through his hair.  

“A...a _contact_ of Erwin’s went off the grid, about three hours ago.  He missed a check-in, and then his phones went off-line, his email’s locked, apartment’s empty...something spooked him, and we’ve got no idea what.  Chances are his cover’s been blown.”

“How important was his cover?”

Levi wasn’t normally one for eye contact,  but at that he looked Marco dead in the eyes, face tight with tension and exhaustion.

“He’s a North Korean defector.”

Marco went to find Jean.

 

Erwin caught up to Levi by the time Jean rousted himself and conjured a tangle of computer equipment across the coffee table in the living room.  

“Careful with that,” Erwin said as Jean plugged a wide ribbon cord into the disembodied hard drive and started tapping commands into a C prompt.  “He might have the whole thing set to wipe itself if--”

Jean just snorted loudly, fingers dancing over his keyboard, and the screen flickered a few times before his laptop rebooted itself off the new drive.  “You were saying?”

“If I wasn’t the one employing you I’d probably try to have you killed,” Erwin muttered to himself, rubbing his temples, and Levi punched him in the shoulder with a smack that echoed even in the high-ceilinged living room.  Jean just grinned around the pen he was chewing on, and started exploring the contents of the new hard drive.

Marco curled up in a corner and just listened, trying to take in everything he can, as he usually did in these weird meetings when a new job’s suddenly exploded around them.  Jean hunched over his computer, cross-legged in front of the coffee table and gradually blocking out everything around him, and Eren just headed for the kitchen and started making food.  

It took Jean about two hours and three cups of coffee to break into the remnants of the hard drive’s wiped email accounts.  “What time was the check-in your boy missed?”

Erwin glanced at his watch.  “About twelve hours ago now.”

“Hn.” Jean sat back and arched his spine with a wince, and then spun his laptop screen towards Erwin.  “What a coincidence.  Your friend got a really damn strange email about...twelve hours and three minutes ago.  S’all in Korean...just a list of names and…” he squints at the small print, little subheadings under each name in the list.  “Family members, it looks like?   _Syung Hung-woo, elder sister, Kim Eun-so, two children, one remaining,_ the hell does that mean?  It just goes on like that, fifteen people.  Jin Ji-Hoon, Kim Song-li...oh. _Oh.”_

The sounds of Eren doing dishes in the kitchen stopped with a loud splash, and his tousled head appeared around the doorway into the living room.  “Isn’t Kim Song-li--”

“That’s Marlowe Song’s real name,” Jean said, spinning around on the floor to stare at Levi and Erwin, behind him on the couch.  “Your ‘contact’ was Marlowe _freakin’_ Song?”

Marco frowned.  Kim Song-li didn’t ring a bell, but Marlowe Song… “Isn’t he that pianist you never shut up about last Christmas?”

“He’s only the best contemporary soloist _alive,”_ Jean said.  “I had no idea he was North Korean.”

“He doesn’t exactly advertise it,” Levi said quietly, and Jean flushed.

“Well, yeah, obviously…”

“Can you trace the sender?” Erwin asked, his soft voice cutting off Jean’s embarrassed mumbling.  

Jean snorted again.  “Not a chance in hell.  They used the best detection-confounding technique in existence.”

“That five-point encryption thing that leaked from the Pentagon?”

  “Nah. Hotmail account.”  Jean shot Erwin a lopsided grin.  “No protection like the protection of 360 million eighth grade girls from 2001.”  

Erwin just rolled his eyes, and Levi nudged Jean in the ribs with a toe, a tacit way of telling him to tone down the snark and get on with it.  

“Best I can give you right now is that it was a mass email,” Jean said, turning back to his computer and tapping through lines of HTML.  “Sent to...Jesus, about a hundred people.”

Levi and Erwin exchanged a glance.  “I was afraid of that,” Erwin said with a heavy sigh.  “It’s a Conan-Doyle.”

Marco raised his eyebrows and glances at Eren, who just shrugged helplessly while Levi and Erwin conferred.  Jean caught the glance though, and scooted over to Marco’s armchair, leaning back against his legs.  “Arthur Conan-Doyle once sent a message to five of his friends, as a prank,” he explained.  He grabbed one of Marco’s hands and dropped it unceremoniously on top of his head, and Marco took the hint with an eyeroll, scratching his nails lightly across Jean’s scalp as he continued.  “It was just an unsigned note that said ‘ _We are discovered, flee immediately.’_ Four of ‘em just laughed.  The _fifth_ guy disappeared the next day and was never heard from again.   _That’s_ a Conan-Doyle.”  

“It was a shot in the dark?” Eren asked, coming to perch next to Marco on the arm of his chair.  “They’re just sending that list to anyone they think might _possibly_ be on it…”

“And waiting to see who chokes,” Jean finished for him.  “If they didn’t know for sure that Kim Song-li was a North Korean defector, they’re gonna know it in a couple days.”  

“Three days on the nose,” Levi said.  “He’s supposed to play a concert at Oberlin College this Saturday.  His US debut, brand new composition. They offered him something like a quarter-million dollars for it.  If he doesn’t show up to collect _that_ payday…”

“He’s blown.”

“He’s _completely_ fucking blown,” Levi agreed, flopping bonelessly against the back of the couch and staring up at the ceiling.  “And we don’t have the faintest idea how to find him.”

Marco chewed on his lower lip, still idly playing with Jean’s hair as Levi and Erwin lapsed back into strategy mode, conversing in fast whispers.  “So this guy.  He’s never been to the states before?”

Jean shook his head.

“Anyone at Oberlin actually met him in person?”

“I doubt it...he’s got a reputation for being super private.  Doesn’t like having his picutre taken, even.  Which is kinda obvious, in hindsight.  He’s only ever played one concert before this one.  In like.  Laos, I think.”

Marco nodded slowly.   “How old is he?”

“Fuck, I dunno.  Mid-twenties, I think?”

“You don’t need to find him,” Marco said, and Erwin and Levi fell silent and stared at him.  “Whoever sent this email, they don’t know where he is anymore than you do.  They just know where he’s _supposed_ to be.”

“Marco,” Eren said, twisting around on the arm of the chair to peer into his boyfriend’s face.  “The last time I saw that look on your face I’d just had a wallet that wasn’t mine reverse-pickpocketed into my jacket.  What’re you thinking?”

“Marlowe Song’s never performed in the US before, right? If anyone’s even seen his _face_ it’s in pictures.  You don’t need _him_ to show up at Oberlin.  You just need _someone_ to get off a plane, speak Korean, play a piano, and get back on a plane, and Marlowe Song’s exactly where he’s supposed to be and obviously had no reason to get spooked by any weird cryptic emails.  All you _need,”_ Marco said, with a slow grin spreading across his face, “Is a twenty-three year old Asian kid who speaks Korean and has a flair for piano playing.  Any idea where you can find one of those?”

Levi and Erwin stared at him for a minute more, and then at each other.  And then all four of them turned to stare at Jean.


	2. Minesweeper

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mild content warning for discussions of child abuse in this chapter: nothing physical or graphic, but the subject matter deals with psychological manipulation and abuse, so please be aware!
> 
> Edit: and thanks to maxxiegalaxy and ask-irl-french-jean for helping me with the French grammar. I would be doomed if you native speakers didn't have my back!

**_“_ ** _Mamaaaan—“_

**_“_** _If you’d stop squirming we’d be done by now,_ mon chou.”

_“Maman, ça pique!”_

_“_ English, _Jean, remember? Only English.”_

_Jean opts for a nice universal whine, squeezing his eyes shut against the cold water dripping over his face and into the sink.  He’s pretty sure his scalp is dissolving.  Maybe that’s how this hair dye stuff works.  It just eats all the way through your skull down to your brain and re-programs what color it makes your hair grow._

_“_ Combien du temps—“ _he starts, but as soon as the first word leaves his mouth he hears his mother straighten up and walk out of the room.  She’s not going to talk to him again for at least two hours now, even if he_ does _figure out how to ask “how long will this take” in English.  He grinds his teeth together, neck aching from being bent over the sink, and tries to pretend it’s just the fumes from the acrid dye in his hair making his eyes sting._

 _He_ hates _speaking English, stupid clunky awkward language, and he_ knows _he’s gonna hate America just as much.  It feels like The Rules are doubling every day as the trip gets closer.  He’s not allowed out of his room if he’s not wearing his glasses.  They won’t answer him unless it’s in English.  Grammar mistakes mean at least ten minutes of silence.  Accidentally using a French word in place of an English one means upwards of an hour, and after a few days of that his heart rate doubles every time he stumbles up against a word he doesn’t know._

_And now there’s this coat of cold, stinging yellow glop on his hair.  To make him “blend in,” it’s always about blending in.  Keep your head down, don’t make eye contact.  America’s dangerous.  It’s important to stay scared in America._

_Being scared isn’t one of The Rules, but it might as well be._

_Jean pushes his brittle, ashy bangs out of his eyes and feels around for his new glasses, with big, round lenses and thick frames.  They feel weird on his face, too wide and heavy, but he shoves them over his eyes anyway and stares at his reflection, wondering why this weird blond kid in the mirror is so much more important to his parents.  His reflection is so alien it’s scary, but that’s the point, isn’t it?_

_It’s important to stay scared._

“I look _nothing_ like this guy,” Jean’s grumbling when Marco gets back to the house, flicking through pictures on the iPad propped up on his knees.

“Not _yet_ you don’t.” Marco flashed him a grin, bright and cheerful despite the fact that they’d all been up since three in the morning, and dumped half a Sephora store out on the kitchen table.

Jean just huffed at him, still staring pensively at the grainy image on the screen as Marco sorted through his new supplies.  They’d managed to come up with exactly three pictures of Kim Song-Li, and only two of them were professional.  The first was from the inside cover of his solo album, his face mostly obscured by harsh, artistic shadows.  The other was a washed-out passport-style headshot out of Erwin’s files.

“ _Seriously_ though,” Jean said, leaning forward and dropping the iPad on the tabletop.  “How is this going to work? I really _don’t_ look like him. Our faces are a different shape, his _nose_ is different…we don’t even know how tall he is.” His fidgeting fingers plucked a box of hair dye out of the jumble on the table, turning it over and over between his hands.  “There’s too many variables.”

“First rule of creating a character,” Marco said, fishing a small padded envelope out of the bottom of the bag.  “People are _lazy._ No one remembers all the tiny little details.  They latch onto one or two big, obvious things.” He tore the seal on the envelope and tips two inch-tall glass vials into his palm, holding them up to the light with a pleased smile.  “And _boy_ did we luck out there.”

Jean side-eyed the bright blue contacts, floating in their little vials in Marco’s palm. His eyes were already starting to itch in self-defense.  “I hate contacts,” he grumped, dropping his gaze back to the iPad on the table and tapping the screen to wake it up.  The headshot from Eriwn’s files is poor quality, fuzzy and washed out, but Kim Song-Li’s bright blue eyes were very clearly visible.

“It’s a _huge_ advantage, it really is.  They’re expecting to see an Asian guy with black hair and blue eyes, and they’re gonna see an Asian guy with black hair and blue eyes.  Everything else is basically a wash.  Not that I don’t have a few extra tricks…”  Marco cheerfully unwrapped a packet of brushes, oblivious to Jean hunching his shoulders and dropping his head, but the moment he said _black hair_ Eren’s head snapped around, and he dropped the bowl he’d been washing into the sink with a splash.  He leaned over Jean’s shoulder, still dripping dishwater, and tugged the crumpled dye box out of his hands.

Deprived of something to fiddle with, Jean ground his teeth together and fisted his hands in his lap, and started violently when Eren’s hand gently brushed his shoulder. His lips moved, but what came out was barely audible.  Marco’s eyes flicked from Jean, who pulled his knees up to his chest and curled completely in on himself, to Eren’s worried expression and the crushed box in his hand.  He set the brushes aside sat down.

“What don’t I know?” he asked softly.  It sounded like a loaded question, but there was no real bite to it.  They were minefields of messy history, all three of them, and they’d all long ago accepted that there’s just shit no-one wants to talk about until they have to.  Until the time came to just suck it up and set off one of the mines.

“ _’m not supposed to have black hair,”_ Jean said, staring unseeing at his fingers tangled in his lap.  Eren grabbed one of the other kitchen chairs and hauled it over in a cacophony of scraping.  He settled himself barely an inch away, worried eyes locked on Jean’s face, but he didn’t touch him again, even if his body language _screamed_ how much he wanted to.

“I’m not supposed to have black hair,” Jean repeated, like a mantra.  “I’m not supposed to be distinctive, I’m not supposed to stick out. I’m supposed to be invisible—“ Eren knocked his knee gently against Jean’s thigh, and Jean broke off and shut his eyes, tilting his head back and sucking in a shaky breath.  “I’ve been _conditioned to believe_ that I need to be invisible, and that I need to be afraid of the consequences even though those consequences were never made clear to me…”

Marco looked to Eren, who nodded his head a bare fraction, before he reached out and laced his fingers with Jean’s, gently pulling apart the white-knuckled tangle.   “Do you want to tell me about it?”

“No,” Jean said, with a soft, bitter smile, but he sighed and squeezed Marco’s hands. “But I think you’re gonna need to know.”

He tugged his hands free, and then he slammed his chair back and _bolted_ out of the kitchen.  He was halfway up the ladder to his attic bedroom before Marco even registered the movement.

“ _Fuck,”_ Eren mumbled to himself, scraping pruned fingers through his hair as he stands.  Marco shot him a worried look, and Eren just shrugged helplessly. “Better get up there before he loses his nerve.”

Eren made a detour into his bedroom, leaving Marco to climb the ladder up to Jean’s attic by himself.  Jean was on his knees in front of his piano bench, one of the hollow versions that doubles as sheet-music storage, shuffling through the detritus of loose pages and battered folders.  He dumped a stack of old manila folders on the floor and snatched something out of the very bottom of the bench: a single sheet of paper, folded in quarters.  Jean glanced up at Marco, for the first time in _hours,_ just for a second before his eyes skittered away again.  His hand fluttered, like he’d meant to hand the paper to Marco but thought better of it, and he slammed the lid of the bench shut and dropped onto it with a groan, digging the heel of his hand into his forehead.

“My mom bleached my hair when I was ten,” he said quietly, scratching his thumbnail over the paper’s bubbled surface.  “Right before we came to the US for the first time…she said otherwise I’d stick out too much.  I wasn’t supposed to stick out, y’know? Not _ever…_ there were rules. _Serious_ rules, how to talk to people, how to walk, how to hold my _head,_ how to goddamn stand still…”

Marco just listened when Jean trailed off, still obviously avoiding his eyes.  He kept his distance, following Eren’s lead from earlier, giving Jean the time to line up his words.  He knew Jean well enough by now to know that if something spooked him, he’d likely never start talking again.

“We changed places every couple days.  I didn’t know where we were most of the time, they’d just wave it off when I asked, like it was…like some dirty joke in a movie I was too young to get yet.  Didn’t know where we were when they…” Jean broke off with a sigh and looked up at Marco through his bangs, eyes too sharp and too narrow.  “Might as well just tell me…how much did you figure out?  I know you asked Eren.”

Marco opened his mouth before he’d figured out what to say, and Jean’s expression softened a little at the sight of him standing there like an idiot with his mouth open.  Marco swallowed, making himself actually _think_ before he spouts off something awful and glib in self-defense.

“I…I know you lost your parents.  About twelve years ago?  But they’re not dead…or you don’t know if they’re dead or not.  And I figured I shouldn’t ask you if you weren’t ready to talk about it.”

 Soft footsteps sounded on the attic ladder and Eren slipped through the door and shut it behind him.  He didn’t say anything, just padded past Marco and sat on the other end of the piano bench, bare feet neatly tucked up under him like a cat.  Marco couldn’t help but be slightly distracted by the sweater he wore, a stretched out dark green monstrosity so hairy it looked like it skipped a few steps between being a sweater and being a sheep.  

“Not bad,” Jean muttered, mostly to himself, leaning back on his hands.  Eren reached over and squeezed his fingers around the folded paper still pinned under his palm, and Jean twitched at the brief contact. “It was Detroit, by the way, where they dumped me.  Figures, fuckin’ shithole…anyway.”  He slipped his fingers free from Eren’s and finally held out the paper.  “These things showed up about a week after we did.”

Marco took a slow breath before he accepted they flyer and unfolded it gingerly: it was stiff, and felt brittle to the touch, like it spent some time outdoors, gotten damp and then dried out again.

**MISSING**

**SINCE 1993**

It was silent in Jean’s attic for a long time as Marco stared at the missing child flyer, slowly taking in the details. The little boy with amber eyes, the birthdate, the bright red 800 number at the bottom, the innumerable little things that still made no sense.

“’s how Erwin and Levi found me.”  Jean had been watching his face, seeing Marco’s eyebrows knit as the confusion set in.  “Levi had this contact…this _friend,_ Petra,in Detroit, a social worker, she saw those posters all over creation and realized the phone number on ‘em wasn’t one she recognized.  Whoever put those up, they weren’t going through any police department, or AMBER, or anything legal.”  His voice was level, but he curled his fingers in tight, nails scratching against the cracked pleather surface of his piano bench, and there was an almost imperceptible sound of Eren grinding his teeth together.  “It was a dragnet, to find me.  And…I’m pretty sure it was the _day_ the posters started showing up, my parents told me they were goin’ to a meeting and never came back.”

“ _Jesus,”_ Marco whispered, lowering the flyer and staring at his face.  Jean dropped his eyes again, but this time he didn’t flinch away when Eren tooks his hand, or when Marco moved closer and knelt down on his other side.

“I was pretty much feral when Petra found me,” Jean said, lacing his fingers through Eren’s and holding on ‘til his knuckles wash out white.  “She tried every trick in the book to get me to trust her, and I lost my shit every time she got near me…I was followin’ the rules, see? I thought if I just kept following The Rules my parents would come back for me…I thought it was a test.  Wanted to think it was a test…” he sighed.  “Eventually they figured that no adult was ever gonna get close enough to talk to me, so…”

Jean turned his head, looking up at Eren, their hands tangled together, and something quietly clicked in the back of Marco’s brain at the way they look at each other.   _No adult was ever going to get close enough, so they sent another kid._ No wonder Eren was so fiercely, desperately protective of him.

“The 800 number went dead,” Eren said quietly.  “After we found him it was just a line for some infomercial jewelry company.   _Custom gemstone settings, made to order.”_

“And they never figured out where the posters came from? Who was looking for you?” Marco asked, and Jean just gave a short, helpless shrug as Eren wrapped an arm around his shoulders and pulled him closer.

“Been tryin’ for eleven years.”

It was sort of a squish fitting all three of them on the piano bench, which creaked in protest at Marco’s added weight, but they made it work, Marco and Eren snuggling Jean tight between them.

“I’m sorry,” Marco mumbled, nuzzling his nose into the back of Jean’s neck. “I’m so sorry, I’m such an asshole…”

Jean shook his head.  “You didn’t know.” He sounded tired.

“I should’ve _noticed,_ though,” Marco said, kissing his cheek and running his fingers through Jean’s meticulously dyed hair.  “I should’ve noticed how bad it was fucking you up.”

“It’s not even the rules anymore,” Jean said quietly.  “Not really…’s more like…I call my parents my parents because I don’t know what else _to_ call them…I tell people I’m half French half Korean ‘cause she was French and he was Korean, but I don’t _know._ I don’t know if that’s real, I don’t know if my birthday’s real, I don’t know if my _name_ is real or just some other coat of dye they piled on top of me…” the words came out in a jumbled rush until he was forced to pause for breath, and Marco felt him shivering in his arms.  “And now you’re gonna add _another_ person on top of all of that…just keep adding ‘em on until I’ve got nothing left to go back to.”

“ _Hey.”_ Eren cut him off, not harsh but sudden and sharp, and cupped his hands around Jean’s face, tugging him close.  “ _Stop_ that.  You’ve got _us,_ moron, me ‘n Marco ‘n Levi, you aren’t getting lost in _anything.”_ Jean shut his eyes tight and wrapped his arms around Eren’s neck, burying his face in the fuzz of the sweater.  “We’re gonna stay close the whole time you’re out there and bring you home at the end of it, and stopping us is gonna take more than hair dye.”

“And straightening,” Marco added.  Eren gave him a _you are not helping_ look over the top of Jean’s head.  “And probably some gel.  And a _ton_ of hairspray—“ Jean groaned loudly into Eren’s shoulder and attempted to mule - kick Marco in the shin.

 

They stayed curled up like that long enough for all three of them to lose track of time, wrapped around Jean in a warm, protective tangle, until the sound of the front door banging open jolted them back to reality.

“Levi,” Eren said, carefully extracting himself from Jean and heading for the door.  “I’ll go, you guys...do what you need to do.”  Halfway out of the room he paused.  “Hey, Marco.”  Marco blinked widely at him as he peeled off the hairy green sweater and tossed it to him.  It was _incredibly_ soft.  “Let this be my gift to you.  Probably fits you better anyway.”  And then he was gone down the ladder before Marco could form a _what the hell--?_

Marco sat back and directs his _what the hell_ to Jean, staring at the fluffy monstrosity in his hands.

“He gave you the Snuggle Sweater?” Jean said, looking almost as surprised as Marco.  “Wow.”

“The...what.”

“He bought that thing at Goodwill when we were in college,” Jean said, rolling his eyes.  “‘cause it was soft, mostly.”

“This thing smells like a stoned goat.”

“Yeah, well. College.  Anyway, you know him ‘n prolonged snuggling...he was even _more_ antsy when we were younger, so he started using that sweater as like… a cuddle batsignal, kinda.  If I got back to the room and he was wearing it, it meant snuggles were welcomed on that occasion.  Plus our heat sucked and you can fit both of us in that thing.”

Marco shrugged and dragged the thing on over his head.  He was still spitting fuzz when Jean flopped into his chest, wrapping his arms tight around Marco’s waist.

“What’re you thinking?” Marco asked softly, running his fingers through Jean’s hair.  “We’re kind of working on a time limit.”

Jean just sighed heavily, curling closer into Marco’s chest, and Marco chewed thoughtfully on his lower lip, still stroking Jean’s hair.

“If I say something that sounds kinda awful, will you kick me again?”

Jean’s grunt was distinctly non-committal.

“Well...think of it like this.  I know the...the disguise and the assumed identity and the being the center of attention for a couple days, I know it’s all messing with your head, but think of it like this…”  Marco dropped his hands to Jean’s shoulders and pushes him back a little, enough that he could look down into his face.  “This one’s not _about_ you.”

Jean _definitely_ considered kicking him for that one, but the look on his face said he was willing to hear him out.  Marco slid his palms down Jean’s arms, and took both his hands.

“All the Rules,” and he tried to say The Rules like Jean said it, with the added weight of the captital letter, “and the posters, all that shit...that _was_ about you, no doubt about it.  But this time _you_ aren’t important.  You’ve just got to be someone _else_ for a few days.   _You’re_ not the one in danger...Kim Song-Li is.  And you can _help._ You’re not important but you’ve got _power_ now.”

Jean went quiet for a long, long time, and it was silent enough in the attic that they could hear the faint sounds of Levi and Erwin bickering about something downstairs.  His thumbs ran idly over the backs of Marco’s hands as he stared down at their twined fingers, thinking deeply.

There was almost an audible _clunk_ when he reached a decision and looked up, meeting Marco’s eyes squarely for the first time that day.

“How serious were you about the hair straightener.” Marco grinned. Jean kicked him.

His foot caught a corner of the forgotten _Missing_ flier, and sent it scudding unregarded into the shadows under his desk.


	3. Birdcage

“This is, bar nothing, _the dumbest_ thing we’ve ever tried to pull off,” Levi grumbled, taking the mug of coffee Eren poured for him.  “Never thought we’d top the purple zebra…”

“Do me a favor,” Eren said, eyes flicking towards the ladder up to the attic.  “ _Don’t_ mention that in front of Jean.”

Levi dropped his gaze, fingers curling tighter around the mug in his hands.  “That bad already?”

“The disguise thing is…it’s messing with his head.”  Eren propped his elbows on the kitchen counter behind him and rolled his neck, trying to work out the kinks left over from being up all night.  “It’s different, y’know? This isn’t putting on a hat ‘n a janitor’s shirt to blend in…he _can’t_ blend in, that’s the whole point.”  He sighed, digging the heel of one hand into his eye.  “He’s been quoting The Rules all morning.”

“ _Fuckin’…”_ Muscles flexed in Levi’s jaw as he ground his teeth together.  “I swear to God, if those idiots who called themselves his parents managed to stay alive, I will hunt them down and–“

Whatever (undoubtedly violent) threat he was about to make was interrupted by a loud burst of piteous whimpering from Jean’s room.  Levi stared blankly at the ladder for a moment, and then looked helplessly at Eren.

“Hair straightener,” Eren said. 

“Did someone just murder a puppy?” Erwin asked, ducking through the back door into the kitchen, shaking the drizzling rain out of his hair.

“Jean’s suffering for his art, apparently,” Levi muttered, not looking at him.  He knocked back the rest of his coffee like a shot of whiskey and refilled it.

As Erwin shucked off his coat and moved to the table, Eren looked to the other new arrival, a young woman who followed Erwin through the door.  She shifted her weight from foot to foot as she tugged her damp leather gloves off her fingers, clearly aware of the sudden tension in the room.  Eren looked between the two older men, who remained steadfastly silent, finding chairs on either side of the big kitchen table and not making eye contact.

With no introduction forthcoming, Eren snagged another coffee mug out of the dishrack and filled it.

“Hey. I’m Eren.”

She blinked at him, and then smiled, taking the hot cup in fingers that were a little blue around the nails from the chill.  “Thanks.  I’m Henrietta. Henrietta Dreyse.  Hitch to most people.”

She looked a little older than him, but then again she also looked like she slept in the clothes she’s wearing, flakes of dried mascara clinging to her long, curled lashes and the corners of her gray-green eyes.  She had the look of another one of Erwin’s endless contacts. 

She also looked half-frozen.

“If you want to take your jacket off I’ll run it through the drier,” Eren offered.  “And there’s some cinnamon rolls in the oven, they’re still warm.  _Levi can show you where.”_ He raised his voice pointedly on the last sentence, trying to get _some_ kind of response out of the vacuum of belligerent silence occupying his kitchen table.

By the time Eren tossed her soaked, stiff jacket into the dryer and came back to the kitchen, Henrietta Dreyse looked like she’s revitalized a little, sitting across from Erwin with her ankles delicately crossed and slowly sipping her coffee.  She held the heavy, chipped UMinn mug like a china cup: _etiquette training,_ Eren thought.  _Private education._

 

“—really think the doppelganger is the way you want to go,” she was saying to Erwin when Eren slipped back into the kitchen.  “We can still announce a sudden illness, broken finger, _whatever,_ if it comes from me it looks legitimate.”

“You’re Marlowe Song’s…manager?” Eren asked, taking the last chair next to Erwin. 

Her eyes snapped to his face like she’d forgotten he existed, and Eren found himself subjected to a much longer, cooler once-over.

“Tour manager, translator. Piano tuner,” She said casually, once she’d finished taking him in.  “Anything he needs me to be.  Which reminds me, no-one’s mentioned _your_ function here yet.”

 _Whatever they need me to be,_ Eren signed.  Hitch just looked on, expression blank, (although Levi smirked faintly) and Eren filed _that_ little tidbit away.  _Doesn’t speak sign language._

“A medical excuse is still an excuse anyway,” Levi said, shaking his head.  “ _And_ it puts you on the radar.  If you make the excuse for him, they instantly assume you know where he is.”

Hitch didn’t drop her gaze, and her professional smile didn’t flicker, but her knuckles briefly wash out white on the coffee mug, and Eren added that to the growing _Henrietta Dreyse_ folder in his brain.  She could talk the Pepper Pots game, but at the end of the day she didn’t know where Marlowe Song was any more than they did.

She blew out a heavy breath, making her neatly curled bangs flutter against her forehead, and set the mug down with a _thunk._ “Then I hope your boy is as good a pianist as you say he is.  Marlowe’s music wasn’t meant to be learned in _two days—“_

“He is,” Eren said softly, and Hitch fixed him with that _I-forgot-you-were-alive_ stare again.  “He can do it.”

“You’re sure of that, are you?”

“Yes.” Eren didn’t raise his voice, or let her break their gaze. “I am.”

Hitch watched him a moment more, and then gave an elegant shrug and lifts her coffee to her lips again.  “We’ll see, I suppose.”  Erwin caught Eren’s eye and gives him a faint, approving nod.  “I’ve got the score in my bag.” She shot Eren a quick, sardonic smile.  “What he _finished,_ anyway.”

Eren didn’t miss the way Levi’s eyes narrowed in annoyance at that little snipe, but before he could say anything the attic door banged open again, and any more conversation was cut off by feet clattering down the ladder. 

“ _Gentlemen!_ And lady. _”_ Marco barely missed a beat when he saw Hitch, his bubbly energy once again _completely_ uncontained.  “Would you care to meet Marlowe Song?  C’mon don’t be shy, you look _great…”_

There was a faint, grumbled Korean curse from the shadows in the narrow hallway, and then Jean heaved a sigh and stepped out from behind Marco, into the warm light of the kitchen. 

Levi’s eyebrows jumped almost into his hairline, and Erwin whistled softly.  About ten seconds later, Eren realized his mouth was open.  He shut it. Then he opened it again.

“Wow _,”_ was what he managed to get out, eventually.  It came out sort of half strangled and froglike. 

Hitch gave Jean a deeply unimpressed stare, and said something in Korean.  Jean looked faintly startled, but he dipped his head and replied softly in the same language.  Hitch raised her eyebrows and sat forward, and the next question was longer and faster.  Jean answered without hesitating, although his voice remained quiet and nervous.

“ _Wow,”_ Eren said again.  Marco flashed him a brilliant grin, the tip of his tongue caught between his teeth, and winked. 

It wasn’t _just_ the hair, although the hair was certainly the change that catches the eye.  Jean’s perpetually tousled mop of blond spikes was dyed glossy, ebony-black, and Marco somehow coerced it into lying flat, combed neatly forward into a stylish, jagged fringe over his eyebrows.  But there were other differences, slowly becoming apparent once the shock of the glossy hair wore off.  Some fancy trick of contouring took the edge off Jean’s sharp features, softening the harsh angles of his high cheekbones, and the effect made his whole face look rounder and flatter, and somehow delicate.  Marco did something to make his lips fuller and softer, and a few careful strokes of eyeliner, barely recognizable as makeup, drew the gaze to the upturned corners of his eyes and helped disguise the European roundness of his natural features.

And that wasn’t even _mentioning_ the contacts, turning Jean’s light brown eyes brilliant, hard-candy blue.  If a little bloodshot.

“Well, I don’t know if he looks like Marlowe Song,” Levi said, when the stream of rapid-fire Korean conversation paused, “but he definitely doesn’t look like Jean.  Pretty good, Bodt.”

“You’ve got one _hell_ of an odd accent,” Hitch said, tilting her head and resting her chin on her palm.  “Where’d you learn Korean, anyway?”

Jean glanced at Marco, who grinned encouragingly and nudged a playful elbow into his ribs.  He hesitated for a long moment, like he was lining up his words with great care, and then, slow and halting, replied.

 _“Please…excuse me…miss. My English…new…lan-guage._ How was that. _”_ The last sentence was back in Jean’s familiar, flat Midwestern, the thick, lisping affected accent gone in an eyeblink.

“Well as long as you never do _that_ again,” Marco said, rolling his eyes hugely and slinging an arm around his shoulders, “pretty close to perfect.”

There was another long moment of silence, and then Hitch reached into the leather messenger bag at her feet and stood smoothly, a plain spiral-bound notebook in her hand.

She crossed the room, heels clicking on the hardwood, and held out the notebook.  Jean just stared blankly, until Marco elbowed him again.  His lips parted at the realization that she was offering it to him, and he reached out to snatch it a little too quickly.

It was staff book  - pages of blank sheet music staves, most of them covered in dense, handwritten notation.  Jean’s curious fingers found a bookmark close to the creased back cover, and he flipped the notebook open to the page.  It was headed with a title, in English, the haphazard handwriting of someone not entirely used to the alphabet:

_Birdcage Sonata_

“Mr. Song,” Hitch said, her perfect smile back in place and her voice warm and professional.  “It’s always an honor to be your guide in the United States of America.”

* * *

 

“Hey Jean, can you see the departure board from there?”

Marco got no answer, beyond the early morning hum of the airport.

“ _Jeaaaaannnnn,_ is our flight still on time?”  His accent had morphed slightly between leaving the house and arriving at the airport: after all, according to the rest of the world (especially the boarding pass in his hand and the passport in his pocket) he was Billy Raconteur, born and raised in Melbourne, and Billy Raconteur didn’t speak with Marco Bodt’s Kiwi twang.

Jean didn’t so much as blink at the sound of his name.  He flipped a page in the folder of music in his lap, humming a snatch of tune to himself.

“ _Simon says…”_ Hitch began with a grin.  Jean looked up only when she translated Marco’s question into Korean, and then glanced over his shoulder at the blinking screen mounted on the wall behind him.

Eren dropped into a seat next to Marco and stretching lazily. “I think he’s getting the hang of ‘not speaking English." 

“I think he’s got a fly on his nose.”

“I thought his twin brother was _great_ in that Budweiser ad…”

Jean waited an appropriate interval before he surfaced from his sheet music and addressed Hitch in Korean.  She listened attentively, and then turned to address Eren and Marco with the utmost of professionalism.

“Mr. Song requests that you… _wow,_ that really doesn’t translate well to English, does it? He requests that you…die in a uniquely awful fashion.” 

Jean nodded decisively, and flipped another page.

They waited, the late winter lazily climbing the sky outside the bank of airport windows.  Eren wandered off and returned with four coffees and a bag of scones, and the time on the departures board ticked slowly down. 

“ _Good morning, we are pleased to announce that AA Flight 367 with service to Cincinnati, Ohio.”_ The announcement came at 7:45, just a little later than the time on their tickets.  “ _We would like to begin boarding today with all business class, American Silver, and American Gold Star customers.”_

“That’s us,” Hitch said, tossing Jean a boarding pass. 

“Suck iiit _,”_ Jean said, just soft enough to be socially acceptable, grinning at Marco and Eren.

“ _Hey.”_

_“Ko-chu-pal-uuuuuh.”_

“Much better.”

Jean got to his feet as the first line of passengers, mostly old white men in expensive suits, formed in the express lane at the gate. 

“Hey, Hitch,” Marco called, catching her attention as she stood.  He jerked his head towards Jean.  “Can we have a minute?”

Hitch’s pale eyes flicked towards the dwindling line, but she nodded with a soft smile. “I’ll hold our place,” she said to Jean, and headed for the boarding tunnel, leaving the three of them with all the privacy they could hope for in a busy airport. 

Eren and Marco instantly reached for Jean, and he wrapped one arm around each waist and sighed, sagging between them.  Eren tightened his grip, pulling the three of them into a tight little huddle, and tipped his head up to press a soft kiss to Jean’s cheek. 

“We’re gonna stay close,” he whispered in his boyfriend’s ear.  “Erwin's already there, and we'll find Levi in Cincinnati, but the two of us are gonna stay close. Just keep your eyes open, we’ll never be too far away.”  Marco nodded, trailing his fingers through Jean’s glossy hair.  A few eyes flicked their way, but no one in the bustling terminal seemed inclined to pay them much attention.  “But you won’t need us. You can do this. You got it.”

Jean closed his eyes for a moment, but then he nodded decisively.  “I got it.”

“You know what you’re gonna do for the concert? For the part of the sonata he didn’t finish?”

Jean’s expression was hard to read through the candy-blue contacts, but the smirk that curled his lips was genuine, and better still, _confident._

“I have some ideas,” he said, flexing his long fingers in a sinuous wave that made all his knuckles pop. 

“You got this.”

"I got this."

_“Final boarding call for all business class, American Silver, and American Gold Star customers, please report to gate—“_

All three of them jumped as the speakers came to life again, and Jean hastily disentangled himself, twisting his head to plant quick kisses on both their mouths in turn.  “See you on the other side,” he whispered, and scampered over to Hitch, who was beckoning urgently to him. 

Marco smiled faintly as he watched him go, but his arm tightened around Eren’s waist, fingers twitching and catching in the hem of his hoodie.  Eren took his hand, stilling Marco’s nervous fingers, and looked up at him, head on one side.  Marco just laced their fingers together, his shadowed eyes fixed on a point somewhere beyond the dingy walls of the airport terminal, and held Eren’s hand so tight his fingers stung.

 

 _“First time in business class, huh?”_ Hitch asked in Korean, smirking as she watched Jean slump happily into the wide, cushy aisle seat.

“ _Mmmmm._ Levi don’t pay us enough to pay for luxuries.”

“Keep it Korean, kid.”

Jean quirked an eyebrow – Hitch couldn’t be more than a few years older than he was – but he nodded without rancor as they settled in and coach passengers started jostling through the narrow aisles.  Like it or not, he was Marlowe Song from this moment until the curtain fell at Oberlin Conservatory tomorrow night. 

“Got the new itinerary from the college,” Hitch commented, back in Korean, flicking through emails on her iPad with a sparkly emerald nail.  “You’re still on the hook for a tour with the faculty.” 

Jean groaned loudly, slumping down in his seat, and Hitch laughed.  “Oh don’t be a baby.  Tours for visiting dignitaries are all the same.  Just smile and nod while they brag about the bullshit architecture.  _Trust me,_ I cut my teeth in the White House Consulate.  Ever seen two dozen incredibly rich Indian CEOs try to look interested in the Declaration of Independence?”

“’m not good at groups of people,” Jean mumbled in Korean, getting used to the feel of the language on his tongue again.  “I get nervous with that many eyes on me.”

“That’s fine, nervous is fine.  You’re a visitor, it just looks like culture shock, like you’re afraid to offend.  You’ll come off very sweet.  Not that you need to worry about sweet…” Jean raised an eyebrow, and she grinned and winked.  “ _You’re_ a genius, remember? You could take a shit in a flowerbed and they’d all talk about how charmingly eccentric you are, so long as you hit the piano keys good.”

“I could break out my Justin Beiber medley,” Jean mused, chewing idly on a thumbnail.  “Let ‘em spend the next two years trying to come up with academic bullshit about the _complexity of the phrasing…”_

“We’re trying to _protect_ the guy, not destroy his reputation,” Hitch snorted.  “Worried _that’s_ gonna be too much for your little fingers?”

Jean shrugged, running his fingers over the plain folder of music in his lap – a neatly printed transcription of Marlowe’s sketchy handwritten music.  He’d been practicing non-stop since Hitch’s arrival in their kitchen two days ago, and by now it was easy to play the simple melody in his mind’s ear.

It was an odd little piece of music, a three-beat waltz tune that only a special kind of person would ever be able to waltz to, slow and driving and strangely repetitive.  There were strains where playing it made him feel like a skipping record, halting and jerking, the right hand stumbling around and curving in on itself while the left hand drove on in a simple, relentless, three-note rhythm, dogged and futile and barely changing, desperate and driven as a bird breaking its wings against the bars of its cage. It wasn’t a happy song, and the more he played it, the more he wondered…

“Hey, Hitch. What’s he like?”

“ _Mm?”_

 _“_ Marlowe.  The _real_ Marlowe…what’s he like?”

“He’s…whoo.”  Hitch let her head fall back against the cushy headrest, lips parting on a rueful laugh.  “He’s kind of an over-serious son of a bitch, if you wanna know the truth.”  Jean cocked his head, curious, and smiled faintly: there was genuine fondness in her voice.  “Nah, that’s not true, not really.”  She dipped her eyes, scraping her long nails through her bangs, and when she shook her head a few out of place wisps of hair fell loose across her forehead, the first hint of a crack in her put together exterior Jean had ever seen.  “He…he carries the weight of the world on his shoulders, you know?  One of those guys…never learned to put any distance between himself and someone else’s suffering. He _cares,_ too much.  About everything.  You know?”

Jean tapped the fingers of his left hand against his knee, marking out the slow, dogged waltz beat of the _Birdcage Sonata_ against his skin. 

“I…yeah.  Yeah, I know.” 

Hitch fished around in her leather handbag (Lauren, probably north of $800, as Marco had definitely noticed and Jean definitely hadn’t) and came up with a pack of cigarettes.  She cast a long, irritable glare at the little no smoking light blinking above her head, and pulled a little square of foil-wrapped Nicorrette out of the an empty spot in the pack.  Jean watched her pop it into her mouth and let her head drop forward, rubbing her temples with her fingers as harsh, tired shadows settled in the hollows of her features, Marlowe’s halting melody doing it’s dogged, stutter-stop dance around the inside of his head.

* * *

 

 “The Conservatory building itself has over 12,000 square feet of plate glass in the windows that cover all four walls of the building,” the white haired man proclaimed proudly, leading his little group down the polished corridors of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music’s central building.  There were half a dozen dignitaries trailing him, mostly of a similar age, and similar dress, and similar weight of self-importance.None of them would have been out of place in the Business Class express lane at the airport. The young guest of honor already had a slightly glazed veneer over his polite expression.

The conservatory director conducted them through the building, rattling off various statistics with little pause for breath, allowing the smooth, stylish interpreter to translate for his guest.  Mr. Song responded with polite acknowledgements or observations, most of which she didn’t bother to translate.  Every so often a member of the board would ask him a question, and he would listen attentively to the translation before offering a soft, clearly thought-out answer, with a shy smile. 

“Our selection and audition process is, of course _very_ exclusive.  We’re proud to maintain a ratio of one faculty for every six students, and I’m told our student body is growing in diversity every year…”

They had reached a central lounge, lit by the banks of windows and stuffed full of well-loved leather chairs and ottomans, occupied by a handful of music students in various states of collapse.  The conservatory director’s eyes lingered on a couple of dark-skinned boys near the center of the room, taking up four chairs pushed together and using each other for support.  They were both heavily engrossed in thick textbooks, but the second the conservatory director’s back was turned the smaller and darker of the two flipped his snapback around on his head and shot Mr. Song a broad, downright _filthy_ wink. 

“Outreach is wonderful of course,” the director said, with a sad, kindly smile, “but it’s such a long _way_ for those poor boys, and they’re so young… I can’t help but think they’d be happier in their homeland…”

The boy in the snapback scratched his scarred nose in a manner that looked remarkably similar to the sign language phrase _“Who’s_ homeland, white boy?” and the tour paused momentarily while Mr. Song recovered from a sudden coughing fit. He apologized in lilting Korean.

“ _I absolutely agree, sir. He_ should _be at home.  With his dick in my mouth.”_

“Diversity of should always be encouraged, of _course,”_ an elderly woman agreed sagely.  “But it certainly does change the _image_ of an institution, there’s no denying.”

“ _So many dicks. All in my mouth.”_

It took Hitch a coughing fit of her own to translate that statement into something relatively innocuous.  Mr. Song rested a hand on her shoulder, the picture of polite concern, bringing himself in range for an _entirely_ accidental elbow to the ribs. 

“ _You_ said _geniuses could never be assholes.”_

 _“I didn’t mean be an asshole to_ me—Excuse me gentlemen, ladies, I hope we didn’t pick up a bug on the flight,” Hitch shimmered, professional smile back in place.  “Your perspectives are _always_ interesting to Mr. Song, I’m sure.  _They’re worse than the Republican National Convention I swear to God…”_

The tour experienced one final interruption, in the form of two very nervous, _very_ pretty music students.  “U-um, excuse me sir,” the bolder of the two said around a barely contained giggle.  “We’re piano performance majors, we _love_ your CD…and…um…”

Jean maintained a look of polite incomprehension (he’d had lots of time to practice) until Hitch translated. _“These ladies would like your autograph.”_

 _“Where the heck were girls like you when_ I _was in college?”_

“Mr Song assures you the pleasure is his,” Hitch said through clenched teeth, as Jean took the girl’s pen with a shimmering smile. 

“Yes, yes, thank you ladies,” the director shooed them away with a maximum of gooey condescension.  “Mr. Song, your manager tells me you’d like to see our pipe organ?”

Fortunately, none of the tour seemed to notice that Mr. Song’s face lit up with childlike glee _long_ before his translator had finished relaying the question.

 

“Oh _God,”_ Eren muttered, pulling his hat off and letting his head fall back against Marco’s shoulder with an audible _thump._ “I think he’s having _fun.”_

Marco grinned, shifting to wind an arm around Eren’s shoulders and tug him closer to his chest.  “Turns out there’s perks to being Marlowe Song, eh?”

“If they let him in to that organ loft he’s never gonna _stop_ being Marlowe Song,” Eren groused into his book (a generic music theory text snagged from an airport bookstore.) 

Marco laughed softly and returned his attention to his own book, twirling an unused highlighter between his fingers.  He’d still been jittery on the plane out to Ohio, but as the tour progressed smoothly and Hitch covered Jean’s few missteps without breaking a sweat, he’d relaxed a little…and, like Jean, started having fun in spite of himself. 

The college experience had, by and large, passed Marco by, and…it was nice.  Oberlin was a beautiful place despite a certain crusty element of the old guard.  The Conservatory’s multitude of honeycomb windows overlooked a small, placid pond with crab apple trees growing on a little island in the middle of it.  Unseasonal sunlight reflected off the water and the acres of glass, playing in dappled patterns across the lounge.  Eren sighed and shifted like a sleepy dog, leaning heavily against Marco’s shoulder, and squirmed and hummed pleasantly when Marco dropped his arm from his shoulders to his waist to squeeze him in a gentle hug.  Even with half of his brain dedicated to the conversation of the tour group behind him (board members making terrible jokes, Hitch translating, Jean’s soft, slightly nervous laugh), it was _nice,_ just lounging here with Eren, like a normal couple with normal intertwining lives.

“He’s doing good,” he observed, watching Jean sign another notebook with a gentle smile.  “Think he’ll be ready for the concert tomorrow night?”

“Oh, _yeah._ He’s a great performer. _”_ Eren waved a hand airily, like Marco had just asked if he thought there’d be lightning in a thunderstorm, and glanced over his shoulder with a faint, crooked smile.  “Played gigs all the time when we were in college.The day Jean realizes _how_ good he is, that’s the day he takes over the world.”

Marco smiled back.  “It’s sweet, how much faith you have in him.”

“’s my job,” Eren shrugged, although his eyes were distant, and a little wistful.  “Beethoven’s concert master,” he said, so softly Marco wasn’t sure he was meant to hear it.

“Hm?”

“Oh!” Eren started, looking faintly embarrassed.  “Old story Jean told me, about the premier of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.  The first time Ode to Joy was ever played…Beethoven was already going deaf by then, so at the end of the symphony, when the entire audience was just losing their _minds,_ he couldn’t hear it.  He stood up there on stage and wept, because he thought his music failed…until his concert master got up and took his arm, and turned him around, so he could _see_ them, you know? So he could see all those people screaming his name, even though he couldn’t hear it…” Eren scraped a hand through his shaggy hair, his fingers brushing almost unconsciously over the disc of his cochlear implants.  “Kinda Jean in a nutshell, isn’t it.  He could spend his entire life thinking he’s worthless, broken… _failed…_ when he’s _not,_ and he doesn’t need someone to _fix_ him, or make him better, make him whole…just needs someone to grab his hand and turn him around.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to make a blanket apology to the board of Oberlin School of Music, which is by all accounts a great place to go to school and I'm sure they are not NEARLY the assholes I made them out to be. Those assholes are on the board of a certain Oklahoma university. I was quoting them directly. To them, I would like to make a blanket statement to freakin' bite me.


	4. Beethoven's Ovation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well that took forever.  
> If you've been with me since Strings, this won't come as a surprise, but please be aware of the content warning for this chapter: it involves a fair bit of violence and blood, so please be careful!
> 
> A few links: The part of The Birdsong Sonata will be played by [Balmorrhea's "The Winter," adapted for piano](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_SDLrKIPno#start=0:00;end=5:30;autoreplay=true)  
> Jean's Christmas Eve Waltz, which last appeared in chapter 6 of the original Liar Liar, is [This version of Cassandra by Two Steps from Hell. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlnuB9tWi4k#start=0:00;end=3:19;cycles=-1;autoreplay=true)
> 
> And finally, I'm on tumblr and kenjiandcompany.tumblr.com.
> 
> Enjoy!

Marco had a lot of skills, but he’d never really pretended that professionalism and restraint were among them.  So, the moment Eren’s voice trailed off, he dropped his book to the floor with a _thump,_ tilted Eren’s chin up on his fingertips, and kissed him like they weren’t in an open area surrounded by a few dozen people.  Eren gasped softly, and then Marco felt him smile against his lips and lean into it, warm and gentle and a little too intimate for the open, public space.

Eren sagged forward as Marco pulled back and blinked glazed, heavy eyes at him. “I’ll never get used to that,” he laughed, letting his forehead rest against Marco’s for a moment, and Marco chuckled along with him.  He was well aware that Jean required at least two lockable doors between him and the outside world before he’d consent to be kissed.

“Can’t attract _too_ much attention.” Eren cupped his hands briefly around Marco’s neck before he sat back.  “’M not exactly inconspicuous to begin with.” He wrinkled his nose, and the deep scar across the bridge.

“We’re too beautiful to be inconspicuous.” Marco dropped another kiss on the scar at the corner of Eren’s mouth, and leaned down to pick up his book again.

“ _Nn.”_ Eren hummed and sat forward slightly, digging an elbow into Marco’s ribs to catch his attention, and nodded towards the other end of the open lounge.  A youngish, slightly frazzled woman was making her way down the corridor with a roll of scotch tape and a handful of hastily printed fliers, slapping them on the wall every few yards.  Marco leaned over Eren’s shoulder, squinting to read the words as she hung one up a few feet away and headed off around the corner.

_“The Conservatory and General Music Building will be closed from 2 pm to 8 pm Friday and 8 am to 3 pm Saturday by request of visiting artist Mr. MARLOWE SONG, to allow him privacy in which to rehearse”_

“ _Shit,”_ Eren muttered softly, eyes jittering around to find Jean in the middle of the tour group again.  “Should’ve seen that coming.”

“That gives us…what, half an hour?” Marco sucked on his lower lip again, thinking, nose scrunched up in recollection.  “Hey, that campus bookstore we went through over in the union…they sold electronics, right?

“Hm? Yeah, I saw some MacBooks…what’re you thinking?”

“Props,” Marco said, a hint of his old bubbly grin flashing back to the surface.  “Hold down the fort okay? I’ll be back soon."

Marco ducked out of the building, wincing as the wind threw stinging sleet into his face.  He checked his directions on his phone and headed off across campus, hands dug deep into his pockets.  Out of sight of Jean and Eren, his easy smile slipped away, and Marco hunched his shoulders tight against the wind.

“ _By request of Mr. Song,”_ he muttered to himself, teeth digging into his lower lip.  “ _By request of…”_

 _Who_ was making requests on behalf of Marlowe Song?

It was after noon on a Friday and the middle of an hour besides, and the bookstore in the Student Union was mostly empty.  The few people scattered through the aisles weren’t very inclined to approach a six-foot-two guy with an obvious cloud over his head, and Marco made a handful of purchases completely un-accosted: a pack of thick black Sharpies, and two Bluetooth gaming headsets.

There was also, he noticed, a little coffee shop tucked into a back corner of the store.

The scent _wafted._

One large, chocolaty purchase later, Marco found an out of the way table in the food court and started cracking into the headsets’ copious vacuum-sealed packaging.

“ _Well,_ color me surprised.  I didn’t think we’d be able to separate you from Jean with a _crowbar.”_

Marco glanced up, and gave a bare nod to Levi, who slumped into the chair across from him.

“Shit came up. ‘M improvising.” Marco went back to the task at hand, coloring over the poisonous green Xbox logo on the headset earmuffs with a Sharpie.

“Shit came up,” Levi echoed, face carefully blank.

“They’re shutting down the conservatory for rehearsal,” Marco said, still not looking up. “’By request of Mr. Song.’ Tonight, ‘n all day tomorrow.  We need a funny-look deflector if we’re gonna run around backstage all night.”

“And you’re doing this with…Xbox headphones,” Levi deadpanned, picking up Marco’s coffee cup by the rim.

“Xbox headphones and a trip to Goodwill,” Marco said, equally poker faced.

Silence settled over the table.  It lasted about five seconds, until Levi took a sip of Marco’s coffee.

“That’s why you _ask_ first.” Marco laughed in spite of himself while Levi gagged.

“Jesus _Christ_ that’s like drinking a candy bar,” Levi coughed.  “The hell _is_ it?”

“Uhm…a Snicker mocha with chocolate chips and extra caramel…”

“Eren’s rubbing off on you,” Levi said, with a very faint smile, and the tension in the air deflated like a punctured balloon.  “Got a way in yet?”

“Probably, I think. Uhm.  Maybe?”

“You’re planning to flirt your way in, aren’t you.”

“Yeah.”

Levi snorted and pulled an appointment card out of his wallet.  “There ya go.”

Marco read the name on the card.  “Tuxedo rental?”

“Gotta make sure my kid’s dressed right for his big recital, don’t I?  Mr. Song’s usual formal wear got lost in baggage handling.”

Marco smiled, a little less fake than before, and slipped the card into his coat pocket.  “ _Did_ it now.” 

* * *

 

“You’d like the piano lid fully removed?” The silver-haired woman said, fiddling with the cord of her headset as she scanned down the list on her clipboard.

Hitch nodded decisively.  “Ordinarily we like it on, at full-stick, makes for a better dramatic visual, but this is such a quiet piece.  I think he’ll need the volume boost.”  They stood in the wings of the Oberlin Conservatory’s concert hall, surrounded by the bustle of black-shirted techies setting up the stage.

The stage manager made a note on her clipboard.  “We’ll bring the ceilings down another few notches too then.  Do you like the shells where they are? They’re pretty close.”

“That’s fine. We like to go for the intimate feel.”

“Cool. Hey, Franz! Bring the ceilings down to the top of the shells.”

“Right you are, Rico.  Orchestra ceiling one, lowering!”

The call was answered by a disjointed chorus of _thank you’s_ and a general flow of techies away from center stage, and Hitch took the moment’s pause to scan the bustling backstage area.

A knot of activity by the people-sized stage door on the loading dock caught her eye: a youngish man in a campus security uniform arguing with a tall guy wearing some kind of ugly powder blue windbreaker, with a black garment bag slung over his shoulder.

“Look, they just told me to take it to his dressing room, yeah?” Hitch caught the distinct Minnesotan lilt to the voice and rolled her eyes.  “No-one told _me_ he was some kinda visiting dignitary—“

Hitch decided the time had come for intervention.  She put on her ‘I’m too important to argue with’ face and stalked over to the stage door.

“If you’d been here on _time,_ they would have known to expect you,” she snapped, and smothered a grin at the expression of complete shock that flashed across the ‘delivery boy’s’ freckly face.

“Mr. Song’s dressing room is that way.” She cut off his stuttering apology and pointed down the hallway, stepping subtly to one side as she did.  As soon as her body blocked the guard’s line of sight, the second, smaller figure lurking outside the door slipped behind her and onto the loading dock.

“And be sure you _apologize_ to Mr. Song for making him think he’d have to perform in a _blazer!”_ Hitch yelled after the retreating delivery boy. While all eyes were on her, a shaggy haired brunet shambled out of the shadows, and over to Franz at the winch controls.

“Hey, Franz. You know who’s got the catwalks key?”

Franz glanced up, just long enough to register the black polo shirt and the headset around the brunet’s neck, and dropped his eyes back to the controls.

“It wasn’t in the booth?”

“Didn’t see it.”

“Huh. Ask Hanna, she was up there earlier.”

“Right. Thanks.” He flashed Franz a thumbs up and looped around the back of the shells, until he found Rico in the other side of the wings.

“Hey.  Does Hanna still have the catwalks key?”

Rico, like Franz, barely spared him a glance.  “Don’t think so. She was done up there before load-in.  It should be back on the pegboard.”

“The one in the light booth?

“That’s the one.”

“’Kay. Thanks Rico.”

“Who was that?” one of the other techies asked, as he disappeared in the direction of the light booth at the back of the cavernous auditorium.  Rico shrugged.

“Ask Hanna. I can never keep the new ones straight.” 

* * *

 

Jean tapped the pads of his fingers across the surface of the dressing room table, eyes skipping over the music propped up against the big makeup mirror.  His fluid, confident movements faltered a little as he reached the end of the last page, the point where the score dropped off mid-phrase, and Jean bit his lip and stared at the handful of chords scribbled across the lower margin in his own spiky handwriting, mumbling under his breath.  A speaker mounted in the corner broadcast the crackly strains of a Mozart piano trio warming up the audience, and Jean pressed his fingers over his ears, trying to block it out as he hummed another jumble of notes.

“ _One_ -two-an’-three-an’- _one_ -two-an’-three-an’- _one –_ don’t-look-at-your- _feet-_ two-an’-three-an- _fuck-“_ Jean’s eyes flicked up from his hands and he caught his own alien face in the brightly lit mirror, and buried his head in his hands. “ _Fuckfuckfuckfuck…”_

“Mr. Song?” Someone outside tapped lightly at the door, and Jean nearly fell of his stool before he recognized the voice.  “I have your tuxedo.”

“What, are you Minnesotan now?” Jean hissed, letting Marco into the dressing room with a garment bag slung over his shoulder and slamming the door behind him.

“Oh yah, you betcha.” Marco’s bright grin wavered as Jean glared at him, and he barely managed to get the garment bag out of the way before Jean thumped into him and buried his face in his chest.

“Aw, hey…hey, duffa, you’re alright…” Marco just dropped the garment bag to the floor, letting his affected Minnesota accent slip away, and Jean shivered and melted against him.  Marco wrapped both arms tight around his shoulders, running a hand up and down the curve of his spine in long, soothing strokes, and Jean relaxed by degrees, nuzzling his nose into the soft curls at the base of Marco’s neck and breathing in the warm familiarity.

After a long moment, Jean huffed a sigh into Marco’s shoulder and pulled back reluctantly, blinking slightly bloodshot blue eyes at his boyfriend.

“What’s with the getup?”

“Extra security for the visiting royalty,” Marco said, picking up the rumpled garment bag and hanging it on a hook.  He grinned at the face Jean pulled and stripped off the delivery boy jacket and Eren’s snapback, leaving him in a black polo and khakis, identical to every other techie in the building. “We had to get creative.” He dug back into the garment bag and pulled out a glasses case, the other Xbox headset, and a little black cylinder that resembled a lipstick case.

“Nice.  Just you?”

“See for yourself.”  Marco prodded the headset’s _on_ switch and clapped the padded headphones over Jean’s ears.

“ _Hey, angel.”_

“Eren!” Jean slammed both hands over the headphones, pressing them closer to his ears, and shut his eyes. “You’re here!”

“ _Told ya we’d stay close.  I got the best seat in the house.”_  Even through the low-fi connection, his voice echoed oddly, underpinned by the distinct babble of a subdued crowd in the background.

“The catwalks,” Jean dug the heel of one hand into his eye.  “You’re in the _catwalks._ The hell are you gonna do if someone finds you up there?”

“ _Wave a wrench around and mutter something about loose bolts,”_ Eren said cheerfully, and Jean laughed, softly, and dipped his head.  He felt Marco’s eyes on him, watching with a gentle, glowing smile from his spot by the mirror, but when Jean turned his head to catch his eyes, Marco looked away.

The gentle patter of conversation through the headphones paused for a second before being replaced by polite applause, and Eren swore softly.

“ _That’s the opener done.  Fifteen minute warning. Time to go baby—“_

 _“Wait!”_ Jean cried, gripping the headphones tight as if they were Eren’s hands in his.  “Wait, where are you? I mean, relative to the stage – I wanna know where you are –“

“ _You’ll see.  You’ll see, baby, I promise.  You gotta get dressed. You can do this.”_

Jean started and shivered as Marco put a hand on his shoulder, but he closed his eyes tight and echoed Eren. “I can do this.”

“ _See ya for the afterparty,”_ Eren said, and the headset went dead.

Jean sighed and tugged off the headphones.  He did a double-take as he handed them back to Marco, who’d spent their brief conversation burying the band of freckles across his nose under a thick layer of concealer from the little black tube.  Combined with a pair of big round tortoiseshell hipster glasses and some kind of subtle, but incredibly effective, change in posture, he was barely recognizable as the jockish dry cleaning delivery boy.

“Nice.”

“Effective?” Marco asked, sticking his tongue out.

“You look _airbrushed,”_ Jean grumped, and tugged the garment bag the rest of the way open.  “Oh please tell me you are _fucking_ kidding with this—“

“It was _Levi’s_ idea!” Marco protested, holding his hands up in front of his face like he could deflect the stream of Korean profanity being aimed his way.

“Still picking out my clothes for me like I’m in fuckin’ middle school…” Jean muttered, digging past stiff plastic and pulling out…not a tuxedo, but a full conductor’s _tailcoat,_ complete with a white satin vest, a white bow tie, and…

“Gloves? _Seriously_ gloves?”

“Take ‘em off and tuck ‘em in your breast pocket right before you sit down, every girl out there’ll get light-headed,” Marco said with a giant grin.  “If you wanna go for broke toss one into the audience during your standing ovation.”

Jean rolled his eyes, tugging his plane-rumpled blazer and button-down off, and still side-eyeing the tailcoat and accompanying layers like he was expecting it to attack.

“Do I _actually_ have to wear the—“

“ _All_ of it,” Marco said, and his smile faded a little. “Levi’s pretty adamant.  He’s not sending one of his boys out there without all his bases covered.”

Jean watched him with his head on one side as he stripped out of the rest of his clothes.  “Hey.” He tossed his pants over the back of a chair and reached out to catch Marco’s hand.  “You’re one of his boys now too.  You know that, right?”

Marco smiled and squeezed his fingers. “I know,” he said, and leaned down to kiss Jean gently on the mouth, before Jean had a chance to ask why Marco wouldn’t meet his eyes. “C’mon, pretty, clock’s runnin’.”

The suit fit perfectly, of _course_ it did.  Against all appearances, Levi really _did_ have an eye for fashion.  The long satin coat nipped in tight at Jean’s narrow waist and made him look even taller, especially after Marco managed to coax him out of his habitual hunched-over-a-keyboard, don’t-notice-me posture.  The rich, embroidered vest, on closer inspection, wasn’t actually white: it was very faintly silver-blue, the perfect color to pick up the highlights of Jean’s milky skin _and_ his electric Marlowe Song contacts.

The person in the dressing room’s full-length mirror still looked alien, but even Jean was forced to admit that he was a pretty damn _hot-_ looking alien.

“Shoulders back, chin up. More than that, c’mon, it’ll feel a little weird.” Marco leaned over his shoulder and nudged Jean’s chin up a little with a gentle fingertip.  “Smile just like we practiced, remember what Hitch said; shy’s okay, nervous is okay, you just can’t _believe_ how lucky you are to be here—“

“I just can’t believe _something_ like that, yeah _…”_ Jean rolled his shoulders, letting the stiff, unfamiliar layers settle into place.  Someone tapped politely on the door.

“ _Mr. Song? Five minutes,”_ came Hitch’s Consummate Professional voice from the other side of the door.

“ _Choke on a hedgehog,”_ Jean called back in his gentle, shy Korean, folding up his music.

Marco chuckled, scraping a hand through his hair and Hitch’s heels clicked away down the hall.  “You’re ready, yeah?” he said brightly, reaching out to touch Jean’s shoulder. “I’ll sneak out after you’re onstage, so no one thinks Mr. Song was getting’ some—“

“Stop _acting_ , Marco.”

It was barely more than a whisper, but Marco froze with his hand still outstretched, and let it fall back to his side without touching Jean.  The buzzing lights were suddenly the loudest sound in the airless room.

Jean did up the last few buttons on the glossy black tailcoat.  “There’s a story they tell, about the premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth,” he said, very softly. His fingers lingered over the rich fabric.  ”They say that Beethoven stood on the stage and wept, because he couldn’t hear all those people cheering, right behind him.”

The corner of Marco’s mouth twitched up a little, but some shadow in Jean’s voice kept the smile from taking root. “I think I’ve heard the story somewhere,” he said, tilting his head to one side.

“I know how it _felt.”_ Jean rolled his head back to stare unseeing up at the ceiling, and one hand came up unconsciously to curl around his right shoulder.  “Like there’s this big black _pit_ right behind me and it’s hiding something _huge,_ right behind the lights _…_ something obvious to everyone but me and there’s no-one reaching out to turn me around.

“You can fool Eren,” he whispered. “And that’s ‘cause Eren’s _good._ Really good…better than I’ll ever be, and you can make him believe everything’s okay.  But not me.” His shoulders hunched, curling in on himself just for a moment, before he turned his head to look at Marco over his shoulder.  “What’s gone wrong, Marco? What’s right behind me that I can’t see?”

Marco dropped his head, folded his arms tight across his chest and bit his lip until a spot of blood bloomed around the point of a tooth.

“I don’t know,” he whispered, eventually, kicking a toe across a scuff on the shiny tile floor. “I don’t know, and that’s the honest truth.  Something’s smelled wrong about this right from the start, but I can’t put my finger on it.”  He shook his head, teeth worrying a long strip of skin loose from his lower lip as he scowled at the ground.  “When they shut down the music building, I thought it was Hitch, it felt like someone was trying to cut us off from you…but she helped us get _in…_ I don’t know.” Jean just watched him, still and silent, fingers scratching nervously across the stiff fabric over his chest, and Marco smiled at the floor, bitter and humorless.  “No one’s turned me around yet either."

A rhythmic clicking sounded in the hall: Hitch’s heels, getting closer, coming to tell them it was time to go.  Jean sucked in a deep, shaky breath, gathering his folder of music close to his chest.

 _“_ I know _one_ thing out there though,” Marco blurted, and this time his hand settled over Jean’s shoulder, and Jean stopped in his tracks, looking back at him.  “One thing that’s out there in the dark for sure.   _Us.”_ He squeezed Jean’s shoulder tight.  “Me’n Eren. We’re out there. We’re watching.”

There must have been a thousand emotions, all racing each other over Jean’s fine features, behind the blue-glass windows covering his eyes, before he just reached up, tangled his fingers in Marco’s hair and kissed him _hard,_ Hitch knocking on the door and calling to him with a note of worry in her voice.

“Right behind the lights?” Jean asked against his lips.

“Right behind the lights.”

 

* * *

 

Auditorium catwalks weren’t precisely designed for comfort, but Eren had long prided himself on his ability to make himself comfortable just about anywhere. Long before the cavernous concert hall began to fill, he’d selected a spot on a narrow metal walkway above the balcony, just a few feet above the curved front row of seats, and settled in amidst the long black barrels of the theater lights clamped to their rails. His hot, dusty vantage point let him see the entire stage below and, with the lights still on, even a few slivers of the theater wings and the loading dock behind the pristine white concert shells.

The big grand piano at center stage looked lonely, he thought, when the bright work lights on stage came down to pre-show dimness the house began to fill. Lonely and a little naked, with the lid gone and all its strings and wires open to the air.

The house lights dimmed and brightened a few times, breaking his melancholy little reverie, and a young woman in a long black concert dress came out on-stage: a doctoral candidate, president of the graduate student organization, thank you everyone for coming out to support the masterworks concert series... _Masterworks. Hear that, Jean?_ Eren thought with a grin. The grad student on stage introduced the ‘warm up act,’ a faculty piano trio playing some Mozart concerto or other.

The audience settled into quiet, and Eren sighed and settled himself with his arms crossed over the safety rail, as comfortably as he could manage. Without the background chatter of the crowd, any movement against the hollow metal grating that formed the floor of the catwalks would echo in the cavernous concert hall. He shifted gingerly until none of the surrounding hardware was poking him, and went back to fiddling with his headset, trying to find a way to make it sit comfortably over the sound processors looped behind his ears. He was considering digging out his pocket knife and cutting some hearing-aid-shaped grooves (would the people in the front row of the balcony notice the rain of little foam bits falling from the ceiling...?) when his headset popped to life again.

“ _He’s away,”_ came Marco’s staticky voice in his ear.

Eren cupped his hand around his mouth and the thin wire microphone before he replied, masking as much sound as he could. “How is he?”

“ _Nervous.”_ Marco’s sigh was just a rush of static over the bluetooth connection. “ _Can you see him yet?”_

Eren shook his head automatically before he remembered Marco obviously couldn’t see him. “Too dark.”

“ _Okay.”_ Eren pictured Marco chewing his lip in the silence before the applause as the piano trio wrapped up their piece. _“Keep your eyes open, love.”_ His headset mic turned off with a pop, leaving Eren’s ears ringing with all the things they’d left unsaid.

The pretty black-dressed PhD was back, microphone popping as she held it too close to her mouth and shifted from foot to foot with the awkward unfamiliarity of someone not used to presenting. Eren picked at the jagged edge of a thumbnail, staring hard into the shadows at the edge of the stage as she gave her introduction, but it was too dark to see Jean standing in the wings until the moment he stepped onstage.

Eren covered his mouth with a hand, as though trying to hide the giant grin spreading across his face from the heavy shadows in the empty catwalks.

“ _Oh Jean,”_ he whispered into his hand, and Marco chuckled softly in his ear. “ _Oh_ baby...”

He’d had a few days to get used to the black hair and the blue eyes and the hundred other tiny alterations Marco’s cosmetological tricks made to their boyfriend’s face, but the way he was dressed now...that was something else entirely.

Eren watched with stinging eyes as Jean stepped out onto the stage, clearly taken aback by the burst of enthusiastic applause. He recovered a second later, hiding his surprise behind the shy, charming grin he’d spent the morning’s tour perfecting.

 _“That’s it baby, you got this,”_ Eren whispered to the tiny figure in the floodlights below him, smiling as Jean hugged the grad student and said something softly, no doubt thanking her in his halting affected accent. He kept his bashful smile in place, but although Eren couldn’t see his eyes, he could tell from the jerky movements of Jean’s head that he was scanning the few rows of the audience he could see through the glaring footlights, clearly looking for something, and after the student left the stage he stayed still just a second too long, staring out into the concert hall. Eren used the last few seconds of applause to shift his weight carefully, wincing as his precarious metal perch creaked under him at the movement, and eased something out of his pocket as Jean removed his gloves and tucked them into his pocket. He hooked a toe around one leg of the piano bench and pulled it out with a loud screech, grinning ruefully as a few people tittered. A faint rustle and thump sounded in his headphones as Eren gingerly resettled himself.

“ _That’s_ charming. _You never told me he could do_ charming,” Hitch said to Marco, voice faint and distorted as his microphone just barely picked her up.

“Had a good teacher,” Eren whispered, even though he knew Hitch wouldn’t hear him.

Jean arranged his music carefully in front of him, but he still didn’t start playing. He closed his eyes for a moment, and then turned his head again, scanning the audience one more time. He bit his lip as he once again failed to find what he was looking for, but as he bowed his head a little round spot of light skated over his hands.

It disappeared for a moment, and then Jean squinted for a second as it ran up his neck and across his face, and he looked up and spotted the tiny reflection, far up in the rafters above the balcony between two bright spotlights, dotting little spots of light across his cheeks like kisses.

Jean smiled, _really_ smiled, for the first time that night, and his shoulders relaxed. He took a long, calming breath, in through the nose and out through the mouth, and then he began to play.

Eren closed the little clamshell hand-mirror he’d swiped from Marco and stuffed it back into his pocket with an extremely satisfied smile.

The Birdcage Sonata wasn’t what you’d call a showpiece: that was the first thing Jean had said about it as he picked his way through the sheet music on his old keyboard. Normally, concert performers who wrote for themselves liked to compose pieces to show of their technical abilities, full of tricks and flourishes that were more show than melody.

Marlowe Song’s quiet, halting sonata had no flourishes. It was stripped-down, bare bones waltz tune, so technically simple that a ten year old could learn to pick out the melody, although a ten year old might never get the point of the odd little song. It had taken Jean all of an hour to have the fingerings down, and yet he’d played it over and over, with tiny variations every time, chewing on his lips and staring at the score as he tried to make the music talk to him. And it hadn’t been until he talked to Hitch on the plane, until he’d asked about the man who wrote the strange sonata, that its halting voice finally clicked in his head.

He’d said that playing parts of it made him feel like a skipping record, his left hand driving through an endless six-note repetition didn’t always quite line up with the harsh, clipped cords on the right hand. There was something desperate about the way the music drove forward, something inevitable, places where the phrasing broke and stuttered and the whole piece dropped into a silence that echoed through the concert hall. Every time the halting, stuttering melody shuddered and fell off, Eren found himself holding his breath until Jean picked up the next note and the endless, looping arpeggio came back to drag the reluctant melody back to its feet and stumble through the next phrase of the undanceable waltz.  
And then, very gradually, it began to change.

Eren first noticed it around the time Marco spoke in his ear again: “ _Is he getting close to the--huh? Oh...”_

 _“_ Hm?” Eren hummed into his headset, cocking his head as another little trill ran through the music, a gentle birdlike run of high notes out above the usual driving rhythm.

“ _Oh, nothing,”_ Marco whispered back. “ _Lost track of Hitch, that’s all...must be off berating a sound guy. I think he’s getting close to the end...where Marlowe stopped writing I mean.”_

“Mm.” Eren was barely listening, although now that Marco mentioned it, it looked like Jean was playing with his eyes closed, no longer paying attention to the score that ended in a cliffhanger. He hit that delicate trill again...God that sounded familiar...he was speeding up, and Eren’s sense of pitch was _terrible_ but he was fairly certain Jean had changed key somewhere in there...It was still a steady three-beat waltz, but it was gradually losing that halting feel, starting to sound like a melody, a song you could sing, a song you could...

A song you could dance to.

“ _Oh...”_ Eren whispered as Jean hit the trill, longer and more elaborate and coming to a dramatic _retard._

 _“Oh he’s_ not,” Marco said in his ear. “ _He’s not gonna--”_

“He _is,”_ Eren said around a breathless, stifled laugh, and Jean looked straight up at his spot in the catwalks and smiled ear to ear as he turned Marlowe’s broken, stuttering, unfinished waltz into the warm, drifting dance tune he’d played for them on Christmas Eve.

It wasn’t just Eren and Marco who felt the change: through the whole open concert hall it seemed as though a weight had been lifted, as though every person in the audience had started to breath again. The six-note backbone of the Birdcage Sonata was still there, still the foundation to Jean’s drifiting waltz, but it didn’t loop and stutter anymore. It was still melancholy, still a soft and gentle song, but wistful rather than desperate, The music had a direction now, Jean’s waltz taking the hand of the stumbling six-note riff, setting it back on its feet, like a child reminding reteaching an old man the steps to a dance he’d long thought forgotten.

Eren swiped at his cheeks; he could hear Marco laughing and maybe snuffling a little.

“ _Hey, Eren--”_ he started to say, as Jean’s music began to build again, clearly heading for some crescendo, and then both their microphones cut out in a squeal of static and feedback.

Eren gritted his teeth, hands flying up to slap the earphones off his head, and his elbow knocked against the rail with a _bang_ that made a few heads turn down in the balcony. He pulled the headset off and glared at the dead LEDs... _cheap piece of crap,_ he thought, more annoyed that he’d missed the climax of Jean’s playing than anything. Ears still ringing from the head-splitting squeal, he was too slow to notice the faint vibrations in the narrow metal walkway he sat on, a rhythmic pattern of footsteps getting closer.

As he glared down at the broken headset, still waiting for his overloaded processors to get back to normal, a hand reached out of the shadows right behind the lights, fisted in his hair and slammed the side of his head into the metal railing, the metallic _crack_ and the _clang_ of his fall swallowed up as the last notes of music faded and the audience below exploded into applause.

 

It was bright, that was the first thing he knew. It was _too_ bright, something was digging into his back, something else was dripping down his face, his ears were ringing, loud and endless, was that damn headset still feeding back--

No. No, that was a headphone digging into the small of his back, no heavy foam pads muffling the sound...no sound beyond the ringing, screaming waves of too-bright pain, no sound at _all--_

Eren tried to sit up and the world tried just as hard to knock him down again, his head spun and his stomach heaved, put a hand to his head on pure reflex and it came away sticky with blood...and a few off-white shards of plastic, the shattered remains of a cochlear implant, someone _attacked_ him...

It took everything he had just to stumble to his feet, something crunched under his boot and he stumbled back, staring down with swimming eyes at the shattered remains of a sound processor on the walkway, raised his bloody hand and found nothing but the frayed end of a wire behind his right ear, they’d smashed one implant and ripped the other loose, he couldn’t _hear..._

_“Lost track of Hitch, that’s all...”_

His hair was already soaked through with blood, spattering across the walkway when he lost his balance again and landed on his knees with a clang. Below him, a woman standing in the balcony aisle looked up as something warm and wet dripped onto her head, but by the time she’d opened her mouth he was up again, gritting his teeth around a desperate snarl that was nothing to Eren but a vibration deep in his chest.

The trapdoor was too damn far away. Eren stumbled down the walkway bouncing back and forth between the rails like a drunken, bloody ping pong ball, shaking his head to clear it and his blood soaked hair left dripping trails across his cheeks. At the back of the balcony the seats were only ten feet or so below the catwalks and Eren didn’t give himself a chance to think twice, braced one slick hand on the rail and vaulted over.

He landed in a crouch, clipping an aisle seat with his elbow and his arm went numb straight to the shoulder, ankle rolled as he landed and he felt something pop but the spike of pain that clawed up his leg was irrelevant, let his broken brain go on believing everything was fine, let it keep thinking the roar of the crowd was silent failure, let it wait in the darkness long enough for him to _run--_

_lost track of Hitch..._

There were mouths open around him, though he couldn’t hear the screams and Eren slammed the door open with one shoulder and barreled into the lobby, into the stairwell, stairs took too long, planted his palms on the rails and jumped again, his leg wasn’t going to take too many more landings like that and something crackled in his wrist but it could be long enough...just long enough...

Eren jumped another flight of stairs, cut across the lobby and headed for the wings, blood clinging to his gritted teeth and nearly as blind to the people around him as he was deaf to the shouts that followed him, he had to get to --

_“--Jean--”_

_He knew he probably shouldn’t read Hitch’s lips when she was on the phone, it was a private conversation and after all, she was on their side, but he knew the shape of that one syllable better than anything else in the world and once he’d seen it on her lips he couldn’t look away._

_He was in line at the airport Starbucks, part of an anonymous jumble of sleepy travelers, she was on her phone, far enough from him and far enough from Jean and Marco to avoid being heard, but not far enough that he couldn’t watch her lips..._

_“I still think its a better idea...” something else he didn’t catch, but the sentence ended in a word that looked a_ lot _like ‘dead,’ and Eren turned his body just a little more to watch her. “A little risky, maybe, but...I know..” something... “There’s almost no chance it’ll--” something else, something short he could hazard a few guesses but he couldn’t be sure--_

 

He was sure now, he was _damn_ sure now, Eren slammed into the wings, out of the milling groups of concert goers and into bustling groups of techies and there was Jean, eyes all wrong and hair all wrong but still _his_ Jean, smiling and nodding to something that had just been said, but not by Hitch, Hitch was standing right behind him, one hand coming out of her pocket, her lips quirked in a tiny smile and Eren saw them moving in his blood-red memory, forming the words he’d been too late to read.

_There’s almost no chance it’ll kill him._

The ringing in Eren’s ears was gone, he was back in the empty, throbbing silence of his childhood, surrounded by the rushing of his blood and the vibrations of his feet on the floor, running to the beat of Marlowe Song’s lurching, wounded, desperate waltz screaming through his memory of sound.

He shoved someone violently aside as he ran for Jean and Hitch but his ankle was giving out, there was only so far he could force it and it buckled every time his weight came down, and Jean was turning towards her, he was smiling even as the tiny pistol came out of her pocket, shaking just a little as she took aim. She wasn’t quite ready when she fired, the tremor in her arm threw her a little and the first shot missed.

The next four didn’t.

It seemed to take forever for Jean to fall. His smile faded slowly, though his eyes had long ago glassed over with shock behind their candy-blue contacts, and he dropped to his knees, like he’d stumbled, like his legs were tired and he needed a rest, like there weren’t four red patches of blood bubbling up through the thick white brocade of his concert vest.

Eren barreled past him, the chaos hadn’t broken through the shock all around them, he could see it in every frozen face, and Hitch was leveling the gun again, her face set and distant. Something clutched at Eren’s leg and he kicked it off and dove at her. She was taller than he was but much, much lighter and they went over together, landed in a heap and the gun flew out of her hand and spun away across the polished concrete floor. Eren grabbed her wrist as she reached for it and slammed her hand hard against the ground, saw her mouth open around a cry as her fingers went limp and Eren scrambled to pin her down, couldn’t make the fingers of his right hand bend so he kept her left wrist pinned and drove his knee down into her sternum--

Someone grabbed him, someone _strong,_ jerked him up and away from the downed woman and Eren snarled again. He twisted loose, breaking this new attacker’s hold on pure, thoughtless instinct, pivoted on his wobbling ankle and lashed out as hard as he could.

Marco didn’t even try to dodge the blow. All he did was turn his head, just an inch, so Eren’s fist skated across his cheekbone instead of slamming into his eye. The blow was still powerful enough to leave a long, bleeding split across his cheek, concealer mixing with the blood beading up along the wound and Eren growled low in his throat and shifted, ignoring his wobbling leg as he whipped a second haymaker at Marco’s chin.

 _That_ time, Marco moved. Even Eren had limits, and the energy left to move his arms was fading fast. His cheeks were streaked with tears, mingling with the blood and the sweat and dripping over his lips as he snarled, mouth stretched so wide he looked nearly inhuman, hair lank and shaggy and matted around his ears. Marco twisted away from the wobbly blow and caught Eren’s hand - not his wrist, but his _hand,_ laced his fingers through Eren’s loose, trembling fist. He leaned into the blow, letting Eren’s own momentum carry him forward, stumbling into Marco’s chest. He twisted again, trying to get loose as he snarled through the tears.

“ _Let me go,”_ he couldn’t hear his own voice but his tongue felt thick in his mouth, choked on blood and tears and the desperate, tearing anger that was just a bare veneer over a whole boiling storm of emotions, “ _Let me go, let me go let me--kill ‘em I’m gonna_ kill ‘em--”

Marco didn’t let him go. Still shaking off the punch he’d taken, he pulled Eren closer to his chest, pinning his arms. Marco caught his hand again, squeezed his fingers tighter, and as Eren wrenched weakly against his grip, Marco grabbed Eren’s jaw in his other hand and forced his head around.

Jean pulled himself to his knees, white and sweaty but clearly breathing. He was staring at them, one hand pressed to his bleeding chest, and even through the haze of pain and rage, Eren finally saw his own name on Jean’s lips.

Less than a minute had passed since Hitch pulled her gun out of her pocket, and as the people all around them began to panic, Jean lurched forward and slammed his hand down over the tiny pistol. As Eren watched, suddenly limp in Marco’s hold, he got to his feet with a pained wince, still clutching at his chest, and fired the last bullet into the base of the plaster wall.

“ _Everybody--”_ Jean paused to cough, leaned heavily against the wall and gripped at his chest again. _“Everybody. Shut. The fuck. Up.”_ He tugged at his bow tie with an expression of pure annoyance and gestured at Hitch, slowly sitting up and cradling her wrist. “Will somebody for the love of God _grab_ that asshole before she gets up?” He looked down, and seemed mildly surprised to realize that his chest was a mess of blood...but it wasn’t bubbling up in arterial spurts, Eren realized at long last. It was just oozing, soaking slowly out of a few shallow punctures in his chest. Jean raised his eyebrows as he tugged a few buttons loose, and prodded in a dazed sort of way at the four holes drilled most of the way through the powder-blue Kevlar vest under his waistcoat.

“Oh yeah, and somebody call me an ambulance.”

Jean shoved the now-empty gun into the waistband of his ruined tuxedo pants and flopped down against the wall in a way that suggested he didn’t intend to move until someone arrived to carry him.

 

When Eren _finally_ stopped fighting him, Marco managed to get both arms around Eren’s waist and drag him through the half-open door into Jean’s now-empty dressing room.   Mr. Song suddenly speaking English they might be able to explain away, but their cover story would never survive some random, wounded techie sobbing over his body.

Marco kicked the door shut behind them and fumbled for the latch, and the moment his grip on Eren loosened, Eren’s knees gave out and he sank to the ground, cradling his head in shaking, bloody hands. 

Marco followed him down, gently took his hands and tugged them away from his head, and hissed between his teeth as he got a look at the shattered, bleeding mess of the ruined implant tangled in his matted hair.  Marco bit his lip hard, fighting down a wave of nausea, and grabbed the blue windbreaker off the door and ripped out the lining, folding nylon and cheap cotton filling into some kind of pad to staunch the bleeding.  “He’s okay,” Marco said, clearly as he could, hoping Eren was back with it enough to read his lips.  “He’ll be okay. He’ll be _okay,_ you hear me?”

Eren didn’t fight him anymore as he pressed the makeshift pad against the wound in his skull, just stared up at him, his eyes wild and glassy…and then something behind his eyes seemed to _snap_ and he collapsed boneless into Marco’s arms, mostly-silent sobs shaking through his battered frame. 

Marco held him tight, holding the pad tight over Eren’s ear and clinging to his own composure with everything he had, (Jean on his knees, blood soaking through his clothes and Eren appearing in the hall behind him, some kind of snarling blood soaked demon full of too much rage to be human,) and it took him a minute to realize there were words mixed in with Eren’s wracking sobs, thick and indistinct as he fought to get them out.

“What happened _?”_ he was asking, over and over, voice muffled by Marco’s shoulder. “What happened? _What happened?”_

* * *

 

_Five minutes into the call, Hitch knew Eren was watching her from the cover of the Starbucks line, but he was also much too far away to hear her over the bustle of the early morning airport rush._

_“...it would even put less pressure on Jean. I still think it’s a better idea,” she said, keeping one eye on Levi’s weird little green-eyed attack dog. “No--no,_ listen. _Think about it. You could be done with this runaround once and for all. You don’t have to keep finding doubles for him if he’s_ dead. _No of_ course _not actually dead! Just one nice bloody cut, you whisk him off in an ambulance and_ whoops, _he didn’t make it, will of God, he’s been called home by the Lord no need for North Korea to keep looking for a dead man. A little risky maybe...yeah, I_ know _the cover’s complicated, but a 9 millimeter straight into a bullet-proof vest? There’s almost no chance it’ll kill him.”_

_Hitch listened for a moment, chewing on one perfectly manicured nail. “Yes, of course I’ve thought about that. I’ve thought about all of it. C’mon, man. This isn’t like you.”_

_She let her old mask-like, charming smile spread across her face as though she could charm the soundwaves, tilting her head and flicking her long, curled lashes in a way that opened locks you’d never break._

_“This isn’t like you at_ all. _Since when are you so afraid of sacrificing a few pawns?”_

 


	5. By Request of Mr. Song

About the time the streetlights surrounding the Allen Memorial Hospital, just north of Oberlin Ohio, began to flick off, a door near an unregarded loading dock clicked open and disgorged a young man in a badly fitted EMT’s uniform, wearing a blue-and-red snapback tugged down low over his amber eyes.

He hovered in the doorway for a moment, outlined by the sterile hospital lights behind him, and then shrugged and sat heavily on the concrete lip of the loading dock. he leaned back against the corrugated garage door behind him, running a hand across his chest with a heavy, pained grimace that deepened the tired shadows under his eyes. The bag dangling from his shoulder, a woman’s slouchy, stylish leather purse, slipped off his arm as he sat and spilled a crumpled cigarette pack and a handful of receipts across the cracked and faded concrete.

Jean gave the pack a long, dull stare, and then picked it up with a shrug and shook it out over his hand. Eventually, a lone, bent cigarette dropped out, preceded by a waterfall of wadded-up Nicorette wrappers. Jean reached back into Hitch’s purse and sifted around (lipgloss, cracked pen, more receipts and a little plastic case of false lashes) before he found a lighter. He took a long drag of smoke and shut his eyes, tipping his face up to the faint pink rays of the rising sun.

The door opened quietly, and Jean’s only reaction was to scoot slightly out of the way, eyes still closed. Instead of the patter of footsteps across the parking lot, however, there was a rustle and a thump as the newcomer sat down beside him on the lip of the loading dock.

“Got any more of those?” the voice had the faint lilt of an east-Asian accent. Jean grudgingly cracked an eye, and then shrugged one shoulder and extended the mostly empty pack.

“ _Gomawo.”_

Jean sat up, slowly, as the newcomer fished out another cigarette and lit it, pausing to shake his soft black bangs back out of his eyes.

His very, very blue eyes.

Jean stared for a moment more, and then blew a long stream of smoke up at the flickering streetlight and slouched back against the wall.

“You’re awful lively for a corpse.”

The newcomer arched an eyebrow, and Jean pulled a folded newspaper out of the top of Hitch’s purse and handed it over, without looking at him

_World Renowned Pianist Marlowe Song Dies From Gunshot Wound._

_J_ ean’s companion scanned the typo-ridden copy, obviously pounded out at the last minute to make the new front page. Marlowe Song pronounced dead at Allen Memorial, complications from multiple gunshot wounds, Mr. Song’s manager arrested, expected charge of murder in the first degree...

The morning sun was quite a bit higher in the hazy sky when the newspaper was finally folded again and set aside. Jean knocked his ashes off against the wall and went right back to dozing.

“ _You’re good, you know,”_ the other man said, and he said it in Korean. Jean just shrugged, without opening his eyes.

“ _My mom was a good teacher, I guess.”_

“ _She was. There’s videos on Youtube already.”_ A moment’s pause, then, “ _What did you think of it?”_

_“Honestly?”_ Jean adjusted lazily, sliding one arm behind his head as a cushion.

_“Honestly.”_

_“Every kid who takes piano lessons for the next fifty years is gonna to learn to play that song.”_

_“You think so.”_

Jean just took another drag of smoke.

_“When someone looks close at the last part...the happy part...who am I going to get accused of ripping off?”_

_Jean opened his eyes at that, and just looked at the other man for a long, long moment. Then he clamped the end of his cigarette between his teeth, and held out a hand._

“Jean Kirschtein.”

“Marlowe Song.”

They both smiled, and even if it was tired and a little empty, it was real.

“I liked it,” said Marlowe casually, grinding out his cigarette against the concrete. “How you ended it. Where’d it come from?”

Jean just shrugged one shoulder. “A waltz should be something you can dance to.” He shifted position, trying to find one that was comfortable, and winced again.

“How bad is it?” Marlowe asked softly. Jean sighed.

“Two cracked ribs, couple dozen stitches...messy and annoying, really.” He rubbed his chest, fingers playing over the edges of the bandaging under his clothes. “I suppose I should thank her for using a small caliber.”

Marlowe breathed out a soft sound that wasn’t quite a laugh, and tipped his head back, staring up at the sky. “ _Oh Henri,”_ he whispered, quiet enough that Jean wasn’t sure if he was meant to hear it. “ _My Henrietta...Always so sure there had to be a sacrifice for me to be free...”_

Jean looked away at that. _There had to be a sacrifice,_ he thought, rubbing at his aching ribs. _There had to be a sacrifice...and sure as hell it wasn’t me._

“Y’know, all things considered...” Jean pulled his hat off and ran a hand through his fading dye job with a rueful laugh. “It really wasn’t a bad plan at all. Just wish she’d told me about it first...I could’ve faked a nice aneurysm or something.”

Marlowe snorted. “Dead on arrival, huh?”

“Dead on arrival,” Jean confirmed. “Have all the cigarettes you want.”

“Do I wanna know who gets to bury me?”

Jean considered. “You know...I’ve heard these small hospital mortuaries have a real terrible record with paperwork. Apparently they just straight up _lose_ cadavers sometimes.”

“Yeah, I think I read that Cracked.com article.”

Hospitals were never quiet, not really _quiet,_ but the pace of activity was beginning to pick up a little...enough that no one would take much notice of an unremarkable young man slipping across the parking lot.

“Interesting afterlife,” Marlowe said, half to himself. “Heaven is a hospital in central Ohio...”

“Depends on your definition of Heaven.”

“I suppose it does.” Marlowe flicked his cigarette butt away and hopped down off the loading dock. He held out his hand one more time, and Jean took it. “Thank you, Jean. “

Something was missing, Jean thought, as Marlowe turned away. His elbow knocked against Hitch’s purse as he lowered his hand, and he realized what it was.

“Hey. Marlowe.”

Marlowe turned back, raising his eyebrows, and Jean held out a little plastic oblong: the case that held Hitch’s pretty, curled false lashes.

There was a moment, _just_ a moment, just a handful of heartbeats, in which Marlowe’s sharp features absolutely _froze,_ too many emotions fighting each other behind his eyes. Then he took the case, and slipped it into his pocket.

“Jean...” Marlowe whispered, and bit his lip, clearly struggling for words. “I’m sorry it happened like this but...I’m glad you were the one to play my music. I don’t think there’s another person in the world who could have done it justice.”

Jean raised his eyebrows, without saying anything.

“I’m serious,” Marlowe said, and smiled, a little brighter than before. “You were perfect, and no surprise. We both had an _excellent_ teacher, after all.” He stepped back and dusted his jacket off, and just for a second his hand lingered over a spot on his right shoulder. He glanced around, as though making sure they weren’t being watched from the shadows, and then leaned in close ans whispered in Jean’s ear in Korean. “ _Keep your eyes on the road, Jean. Just a piece of advice. From one rare gem to another._ ” He tapped the pad of one finger beneath his eye, and smiled.

Jean stared after him, shocked into speechlessness. Marlowe’s hand stayed in that pocket as long as Jean could keep him in sight, until he was lost in the bustle of people around the corner of the building. Long after he’d gone, Jean broke his trance just enough to lift one hand and curl it slowly around his right shoulder, over the spot where a crude five-sided coat of arms marked his skin.

* * *

 

Historically, Marco had never been any good at sleeping in a chair. Then again, it had been a _long_ time since he’d been this tired; tired straight to his bones. _Tired in the heart,_ his sister Maura used to call it. He slept.

Levi had driven them to the hospital, once Eren’s bleeding was under control and Jean had been stuffed into an ambulance. _He’s my boyfriend,_ Marco told the nurses tearfully, _we had a fight and I shoved him, only a little, it wasn’t hard but he tripped and he fell--_ and he was more than happy to put up with a long night full of dirty looks, as long as no one connected them to the disaster at Oberlin College.

The early news reports made mentions of a bystander intervening, someone who jumped in to knock the gun from Hitch’s hands, but as the night went on that element slowly slipped away. The newscasters had Franz Holland, who’d restrained Hitch until the police arrived, and they were more than happy to let him be the hero of the night.

They were safe. Eren and Jean were out of danger. Erwin was somewhere in the bowels of the hospital by now, working his magic with whatever nearby ‘contacts’ he’d no doubt pulled out of thin air.

Marco slept.

He jolted awake not long after dawn, when Levi collapsed in a chair beside him like a small, boneless avalanche, nose buried in a clipboard. Several insurance cards were produced along with some virulent _Quebecois_ swearing while Marco slowly unkinked his muscles, and then Levi flopped back to his feet and handed the clipboard to a nurse without really looking at her, his eyes trained on the curtains around a bed in the corner.

Marco stood himself, slow and a little uncertain, when the curtains drew back and Eren slipped out, eyes downcast. He’d been given a loose green scrub top to replace his blood-soaked shirt, and the hair above his ears had been clipped back around a thick gauze pad.

Both his cochlear implants were gone.

Eren froze in place when he saw Marco, still a good ten feet away on the other side of the ward. He stared at him with wide eyes, like a deer trying to decide whether or not to run, and Marco’s heart twisted painfully.

He tapped the side of his own head, trying to indicate Eren’s injury, and cupped his hands behind his ears, raising his eyebrows in question. Eren made a disgusted face and sliced his thumb across the base of his throat, and the meaning was more than clear. _Implants broken. Can’t hear._ Marco made a sympathetic face, and Eren seemed to shake off a little of his uncertainty.

He came close slowly, almost like he was afraid, and it took Marco’s sleepy brain a moment to realize that he _was_ afraid -- afraid of being turned away.

He took a step forward and held out his arms, and Eren bit his lip and closed the distance between them, still slow and cautious, hands balled into tight fists at his sides. When Marco didn’t move away, he came even closer, moving slowly right into Marco’s space until they were nearly chest-to-chest, and Marco reached out to gently loop his arms around Eren’s waist.

Eren let out a long, shaky breath, and _finally_ lifted his head to meet Marco’s gaze, his eyes still dark and downcast. He lifted a hand, slowly, like he still expected Marco to flinch away at any second, and brushed his fingertips carefully against the bruised, swollen split in Marco’s cheek, guilt written in every line of his face.

“Eren...oh Eren, _no...”_ Marco covered Eren’s smaller hand in his. Eren dropped his head again, wouldn’t look up at Marco to read his lips, and Marco just turned his head, holding Eren’s hand in place and pressing warm, forgiving kisses to the center of his palm. Eren shivered against him, his fingers curling around Marco’s cheek.

“ _I’m sorry,”_ he whispered, his voice stilted and thick without his implants allowing him to hear himself. Marco just shook his head, knowing Eren would feel it, and tugged him close and held him tight until Eren’s hands stopped shaking.

Neither one of them moved, not until Levi came quietly up beside them and touched Eren’s shoulder gently. He looked exhausted, but his eyes flicked over Eren a mile a minute, scanning for any more damage done to his already-battered son.

“How long ‘til you’re healed enough to get new implants?” Marco asked. Eren’s eyes flicked to Levi to fill in the gaps he couldn’t lip read, and he responded with a loud, emphatic raspberry.

“About six months,” Levi translated. “But you’ll get an upgrade.” He was answered by another burst of flatulence.

“Come on,” Levi said, with a very faint smile, and repeated the phrase to Eren with a quick, sloppy sign language gesture. “Let’s get the hell out of this place.”

 

Levi lead them to the roof of the parking garage attached to the hospital, and to Erwin waiting next to a thoroughly forgettable beige rental car. From a distance, he looked as put together as ever...but closer to, the wear was starting to show. Close up, he looked like all the rest of them, like he was wearing thin around the edges.

“Done?” Levi asked him. Erwin nodded, and that appeared to be everything either one of them intended to say.

Marco kept his arm around Eren’s shoulders, holding him close, and Eren relaxed gradually, a warm, solid weight leaning into Marco’s side. “I’m sorry too,” Marco said, mostly to Levi, although he felt Eren look up, tilting his head to follow what he could of the conversation. “I should’ve stayed closer...lost track of _both_ of ‘em in the dark back there. I didn’t even _notice_ when Hitch slipped me.”

Levi shook his head, casting his eyes to the ground. “You weren’t wrong to trust her,” he said, with a heavy sigh. “She was _there_ to back you up...it was our bad call, not yours.” Eren nodded, and his hand found Marco’s and squeezed it tight. Erwin stayed silent; he was looking over Marco’s shoulder, watching the door to the stairwell.

Sound carried on the deserted concrete rooftop, and they all heard it when the door opened, with a soft, metallic clunk. Marco got Eren’s attention with a soft kiss nuzzled into his tangled hair, and then he gently nudged Eren’s head around.

Jean walked across the rooftop towards them, a little stiff as his ribs and the shallow punctures in his chest twinged with every step. He still wore the too-big EMT jacket, and Hitch’s purse dangled from his hand.

Eren froze again, teeth digging into his lower lip as his eyes glazed over with tears. Marco loosened his hold, stepped back and gently nudged Eren forward with a hand on his shoulder. Jean seemed to hesitate himself as Eren took a shaky step towards him...and then Hitch’s purse thumped to the ground and they met halfway in a desperate, clinging hug and Eren finally stopped holding back.

Jean’s arms closed tight around Eren’s waist, hands fisted in the back of his shirt to hold him up when his knees buckled, and Eren collapsed into Jean’s arms and just _cried._ Jean managed to brace both feet and hold him, Eren’s arms braced over his shoulders and his hands moving over Eren’s back at a pace just shy of frantic, both of them desperate to feel each other alive and whole.

Marco felt Levi’s eyes on him when he stepped back, leaning against the car to give Jean and Eren a moment alone, a moment just to hold each other. “It’s okay,” he said softly, watching Jean nudge Eren back enough to ask him something with sign language. Eren shook his head, biting his lip against another sob before he buried his face in Jean’s neck again. “It runs deeper for them.” The sidelong look Levi gave him suggested he didn’t entirely believe him, but he didn’t push the matter. He just reached over and squeezed Marco’s hand, before leaning into Erwin’s side with a tired sigh.

Marco leaned back against the cold, dusty metal of the car behind him, and shut his eyes. Remembering Eren’s inhuman, blood-drenched snarl and the shock in Jean’s eyes as the bullets slammed into his chest, he was coming to understand how hard Jean and Eren’s bone-deep terror of losing each other could bite at the soul.

“ _Marco.”_ Marco opened his eyes to find Jean watching him, over the top of Eren’s head. There was a faint tremor in Jean’s voice when he said, “Marco, get _over_ here.”

And just like Eren, Marco hesitated...only for a moment, before Jean blinked teary eyes at him and held out his hand. Marco took it, and let Jean pull him forward, and as long as both their arms were wrapped tight and warm around him, Marco didn’t think of anything at all.

Levi and Erwin didn’t say a word until they broke apart on their own, until Eren had cried himself out into Jean’s shoulder and they had thoroughly appraised themselves of each other’s injuries. Even after he’d brought his breathing under control and pulled back a little from Jean’s embrace, Eren’s fingertips kept straying across Jean’s bandaged chest, as though afraid that if he stopped the bullet wounds he’d seen Jean take the night before would re-appear.

Levi shifted foot-to-foot, a little awkwardly, and Jean gently nudged Eren back to Marco’s arms and slipped over to hug him.

“Okay, sweetheart?” Levi whispered in his ear, hands shaking just a little as he gently let Jean go.

“Okay,” Jean confirmed, pressing a hand to his sternum. “ _Sore,_ but okay.” He glanced sheepishly at Marco. “I suppose I should apologize for bitching you out about the bulletproof vest, huh?”

Levi winced. “You weren’t supposed to need it,” he whispered.

Eren pulled away from Marco with a sudden jerk, and signed a question in sharp, terse moves. Marco had a vague idea, but it wasn’t til Levi answered him that he fully understood.

_Why didn’t you tell me?_

Levi looked away, running a shaky hand through his bangs. “Because I knew you wouldn’t believe me if I said he wouldn’t need the vest,” he said. “I didn’t want you to panic. I’m sorry, kid. I’m so sorry.”

“You didn’t think I’d need it,” Jean said softly. “But you suspected, didn’t you?”

“Hitch...proposed the idea,” Levi said, a hint of bitterness creeping into his voice. “Fake your death in public, let anyone hunting Marlowe think he was off the table. Her suggestion was rubber bullets.” Jean winced. “Messy, but not dangerous. We nixed it. Even if fake deaths _weren’t_ a pain in the _ass_ to pull off...” Levi sighed, and Erwin wrapped an arm around his shoulders. “Fuck it, I don’t sign off on plans that involve guns being pointed at _my kid.”_

_“_ It still doesn’t make sense.” Marco stared at the ground, rubbing a finger under his nose as he tried to line up the thoughts that had been knotted up his head for days now. “She had our backs. It wasn’t fake...she was bedrock fuckin’ solid, every second. She could have fucked us over a hundred times...hell, we might not have made it into the _building_ without her.” He glanced down at Eren, still leaning into his side. “She snuck us in, and then attacked Eren in the catwalks...went after him, but not _me,_ and I was right beside her almost the whole night. It was _her_ plan, and she practically hamstrung herself, it’s almost like--”

“She wasn’t sure.” It was barely more than a whisper, but on the quiet rooftop Jean’s voice cut clear through Marco’s frustrated rambling. “You said her plan was rubber bullets, but she shot me with live ammo. Rubber bullets would bounce right off a Kevlar vest. She _guessed_ you’d take precautions, but...she wasn’t sure. If I wasn’t wearing a vest, she’d have shot me straight through the heart. It’s almost like...” He raised his eyes to Marco’s.

“It’s almost like she wanted us to stop her,” Marco finished for him.

“She couldn’t see any other way to end it,” Erwin said softly, and Marco started: it was the first thing he’d heard Erwin say all day. “North Korea won’t stop looking for him, he’s too valuable. The things he knows...it would never end. It was the only way to set him free, let him do what he needed to do.” Levi looked up at him and slid his arm around his waist, finding Erwin’s hand and tracing his fingertips over his silver wedding band.

“ _There had to be a sacrifice,”_ Jean said, very softly, staring at the ground.

“Do what he needed to do?” Marco asked, but before Erwin could answer, Jean spoke again.

“Remember the email? The Conan-Doyle email that started all this, just a list of names? People and their family members? _Mother and grandparents, two children, father and uncle..._ I think I know what that’s about...it’s blackmail. Threats. Every person on that list has family still in North Korea.” He glanced up at Erwin, and bit his lip. “Marlowe Song has three little sisters. Hitch tried to give him the freedom to try to get them out.”

_He’s too valuable,_ Marco thought. _The things he knows...he’s too valuable..._

_“_ Next flight back to Minneapolis leaves at five,” Levi said, somewhere behind the whirlpool roar of Marco’s thoughts. “What’re you thinking?”

Jean glanced over at his boyfriends, and then reached out to catch Eren’s hand. “I think we’ll take the long way home.”

Levi smiled, faintly, and tossed him the car keys. “Thought you might.”

_There had to be a sacrifice, to do what he needed to do...she wasn’t sure...he’s too valuable, it’s almost like..._

_“_ Marco?” Jean asked, jolting him out of his reverie.

“Hm?”

Jean held out the keys with a faint smirk, and, (black hair aside) for a second he finally looked like himself again. “Neither one of _us_ is exactly fit to drive.”

“Oh. _Right.”_ Marco took the keys and unlocked the car absent-mindedly, head still whirling. Jean held out an arm to Eren, and the two of them snuggled into the backseat.

“Remind you of anything?” Levi whispered to Erwin, watching through the tinted windows as his tired, injured kids curled into a comforting ball. With Jean cuddled close against his chest, Eren looked half asleep already. Erwin huffed out a soft laugh, and wrapped both arms around Levi’s shoulder, tugging him into a warm, gentle hug.

Marco stayed where he was, biting his lip and staring unseeing at the cracked concrete.

_It’s almost like...it’s almost like...they closed down the building but_ she _got us in, part of her wanted us there, wanted us to stop her, she wasn’t sure...she thought she could kill if she had to but she wasn’t_ sure. _He’s too valuable, there had to be a sacrifice, he’s too valuable, the things he knows, the building was closed by request but she wanted us there she wasn’t sure..._

_There had to be a sacrifice..._

“Jobs go wrong, Marco,” Erwin said kindly. He ran a hand down Levi’s back in a soothing stroke, his eyes on the younger man lost in thought in front of him. “You did well, all three of you. Don’t get caught up blaming yourself, sometimes getting out alive is the best you can hope for. There’ll always be something you couldn’t plan for, something got changed--”

_It was too risky but there had to be a sacrifice, they closed down the building but she got us in, something got changed, it’s almost like she wanted us to stop her but something got changed--_

Deep in the ugly shadows of Marco’s mind, the right thing pulled and the whole knot unraveled.

_She wanted us to stop her but--_

_“_ Something got changed,” Marco echoed, and very slowly looked up, to meet Erwin’s eyes over the top of Levi’s head. “By request of Mr. Song.”

Erwin looked away.

 


	6. One King

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I liiiiiiiiiiiive. Have a chapter written almost entirely during the less-interesting talks at the conference I'm attending! If it's been awhlle since your last jaunt over to Liar Liar proper, you may want to go refresh your memory of Wontons)

About an hour out of Oberlin, Marco turned the car off the interstate and pulled into a little motel nestled under a towering overpass. He went inside alone, leaving Jean and Eren curled up tight in the back seat, and handed Erwin’s credit card to the sleepy girl at the desk.

“Would you like two queens or one king, Mr…Raconteur?” she asked, glancing at his driver’s license (Minnesota resident).

Marco only hesitated for a second before he replied “One king.”

He accepted a single plastic keycard in its envelope and pulled the car around to the back of the hotel, as close to the rear doors as he could get. They skulked inside like celebrities running from the paparazzi, Eren’s hood pulled up tight over his bandaged head, and all of their luggage fitting easily over Marco’s shoulder.

None of them said anything: they hadn’t since they left the hotel parking garage outside of Oberlin. It was partly out of respect for Eren, who had enough on his mind without trying to read lips. And it was partly because none of them had the faintest idea what to say.

Jean went right for the slightly dingy, fluorescent-lit bathroom, his arm curled tight around Eren’s shoulders again the second the door clicked shut behind them. He _did_ glance at Marco, just once, over Eren’s head (his thick hair tangled and dusty and still matted in places with clinging cakes of blood) and Marco just nodded, knowing they needed the time alone. As the shower turned on, the sound of the spray echoing loud in the tiny bathroom, Marco collapsed onto the bed (one king) and pulled out his laptop. He flipped it open, swearing under his breath at the slow hotel connection, and started searching, brows knit tight with concentration. He barely moved as he stared at the screen, fingers sketching out the occasional gesture, or scratching absently when the stiff patches of Eren’s blood dried on his shirt irritated his skin.

Behind the half-open bathroom door, Jean wrenched the shower up as hot as it would go. Eren had to help him out of his shirt, wide eyes going dim again as Jean’s cracked ribs protested the movement. Eren rested his fingertips against the mottled patchwork of black bruises spread across Jean’s pale chest, and let his head drop against Jean’s shoulder as Jean guided him into the water.

They spent a long time under the scalding water, silent as ever, Eren still leaning heavily against Jean. Jean, for his part, emptied the entire tiny bottle of citrus shampoo into his hands and worked it through Eren’s hair with painstaking gentleness, rubbing away every last trace of blood and dust and sweat tangled around the bandages just behind his ear.

Jean only let go of Eren long enough to scrub vigorously at his own hair with the remains of the shampoo and a flaky bar of soap, muddy black dye swirling into the water around their feet.

Eren didn’t let go of Jean at all.

Once they were both thoroughly clean, the hot water stinging on raw-scrubbed skin, Jean cupped both hands around Eren’s cheeks and nudged his face up to look at him, his back to the spray shielding their faces from the water. He’d outgrown Eren years ago, when they were still in middle school, but the movement still felt alien, making Eren look _up_ at him…he was so used to being lower than Eren, curled up against his chest or hunched over his keyboard while Eren leaned on his shoulders. And even when they were standing face to face, it was so unusual for his blunt, forthright Eren to avoid his eyes like this.

At least Eren met his eyes this time, even if it was slow, and his gaze was still distant and unfocused. Jean leaned in and kissed him, careful of the bitten splits in Eren’s lips that were blossoming into sores. Eren let himself be kissed, even if he didn’t respond, a few tears slipping from the corners of his eyes.

It was chilly, outside the steaming heat of the shower; even Eren shrugged his sleeveless blue hoodie on over his boxers, for the familiarity as much as the warmth. He left Jean rummaging for more layers and perched gingerly on the edge of the bed, just behind Marco hunched over his laptop in a very Jean-like pose. The split from Eren’s fist stood out raw against his cheekbone, dark bruises spreading out to obscure Marco’s freckles.

Marco glanced up at him, looking startled, as the bed shifted under his weight, and Eren caught a glimpse of the laptop screen. A YouTube video: “Twenty ways to say I love you with sign language.” Marco looked embarrassed.

Eren leaned over him and closed his laptop firmly. Then he pulled himself fully onto the bed and crawled into Marco’s lap, winding his arms tight around his broad shoulders and nuzzling into his neck.

Marco blinked, lips parting in surprise. Eren wasn’t a cuddler. He’d lean against them, rest his head on a chest or a shoulder, let Marco nuzzle into his hair at night or curl up around Jean and rest a book on his back, but too much restriction and he’d huff and squirm like a puppy that wanted to be set down. He felt so _small_ like this, curled up in Marco’s arms…he’d never thought of Eren as small before, delicate and vulnerable and wanting to feel protected.

Marco cupped one hand around Eren’s damp head, laying them both down amongst the stacks of starchy hotel pillows as Jean slipped out of the bathroom, drying his hair with a dye stained towel. His eyes softened at the sight of them, restless squirmy Eren snuggled close into Marco’s side and asking with every inch of his body to be held.

“Hey…hey there, beautiful,” Marco whispered, maybe more for his own benefit than Eren’s, nudging his nose against Eren’s cheek. He found Eren’s hand, resting on his side, laced their fingers together and squeezed tight and quick. Eren emerged from the crook of Marco’s shoulder, looking down curiously as Marco spread the fingers of Eren’s left hand apart. He folded two of them down, middle and ring finger, leaving Eren’s hand splayed out in the simplest sign he’d picked up in his YouTube binge: an amalgamation of the sign language letters for I, L, and Y… “I love you.”

Eren’s eyes misted over again, and his face disappeared right back into Marco’s shoulder, where he nodded vigorously. Marco chuckled softly, slipping his hands inside Eren’s unzipped hoodie and wrapping his arms tight around his middle. The big bed creaked again as Jean flopped down on Eren’s other side, pressing up against his back and reaching for both of them. His hands found Marco’s, and he laced their fingers together over Eren’s sides, the two of them holding Eren close and warm between them.

Eren did squirm, eventually, but just enough to wriggle out of his open sweatshirt, already a little too warm from being sandwiched. Marco let him go willingly, but the moment Eren’s shirt was off he curled right back into Marco’s side, shaking hands finding Marco’s arm and pulling back around his shoulders.

Marco had thought his heart couldn’t melt anymore.

“Oh Eren,” he whispered, forgetting for a moment that Eren couldn’t hear him. He curled a hand around the back of Eren’s head, buried in his shoulder, running his fingers through his damp hair. Jean shifted, leaning up enough to press a deep, lingering kiss to the corner of Marco’s mouth. Then Jean turned his attention back to Eren, trailing soft kisses behind his ears and down his neck that made him sigh and shiver in Marco’s arms.

Eren pressed closer and Marco gathered him in, his breath coming a little faster even though his eyes still stung. Jean snuggled up to kiss him again, and Marco leaned into him, an odd wave of déjà vu running through his head. Burning eyes and boys leaning on his shoulders and Eren pulling his arm around his shoulders, asking for Marco’s affection…

“ _I’m just so_ powerless,” _he’d choked out, burying his sobs in Eren’s hair, Jean’s piano still played behind the attic door against his back, and Eren sniffled against his shoulder, his arms winding tight around Marco’s waist…and on the other side of the door, Jean rested his hand on the knob, biting his lip around his own hitching breaths._

_When the door behind him snapped open, Marco overbalanced and fell nearly flat on his back, Eren tumbling down onto his chest. Marco propped himself up on bruised elbows, and Jean’s upside down glare filled his vision, his own cheeks streaked with tears and one hand still on the doorknob._

_“Don’t you_ ever _say that again,” Jean practically spat the words, fresh tears clinging to his lashes._

_“Jean—“_

_“Baby, how long were you listening?” Eren asked, pushing himself up off Marco’s chest and sitting back on his heels._

_Jean ignored him completely, dropping to his knees beside Marco and grabbing his shoulders – not gently, either._

_“Never,_ ever, _again, you hear me Marco?”_

 _“_ Jean—“ _Eren said softly, a note of warning in his voice._

_Marco felt frozen, still holding himself up on his elbows and staring into Jean’s swimming eyes. As he watched, the anger and frustration seemed to melt out of Jean’s expression, and Jean curled his fingers around Marco’s face, tugging him close ‘til their foreheads pressed together._

_“Don’t say that,” he whispered, their breath mingling in the bare space between their lips. “Don’t_ say _that…you can’t_ ever _be powerless, not when you’re with us…” Jean leaned back, searching Marco’s face, and he sounded almost desperate when he said, “Don’t you know what you_ are _to us?”_

 _Don’t you know what you are to us?_ Marco thought, running his hands in long, soothing strokes down the curve of Eren’s spine. _Don’t you know what we’d be without_ you?

His fingers stuttered over the ridges of scar tissue that crisscrossed Eren’s back, muscles shifting under soft skin, as Eren’s warm, wiry little body pressed closer to his.

 _What we’d be without you…_ Marco met Jean’s worried eyes over Eren’s shoulder. _What we’d be without you…_ self-flagellating and frightened and _fake,_ they’d just be trapped in the certainty of their own self-loathing without the endless warmth of Eren’s love to break the cycle. This warm, beautiful boy in Marco’s arms, so completely unwilling to stand aside and let anyone be hurt, no matter how many scars it left etched across his skin.

Marco let Jean guide him, when he needed to, soft whispers and careful nudges placing Marco’s gentle affection right where Eren needed it. The way Jean and Eren understood each other never failed to leave Marco with a fluttering heart.

Every few minutes, Eren would reach for Jean, running his fingers over the shallow wounds in his bare chest. And every time, Jean would catch his hands, twine their fingers together and nudge him back into Marco’s arms.

 _Reminding him,_ Marco thought.  Eren was waiting for all the bad to come back, waiting for the bullet holes he’d seen blow out Jean’s chest to return, waiting for Marco to push him away. And every time Jean reminded him silently, that his skin and his heart were still whole, that Marco’s arms still opened for him, and the tension in Eren’s body finally began to ebb away.

Marco sought out Eren’s hand and squeezed it in his, and Eren sighed softly and raised his head. He didn’t shrink away when Marco kissed him, and when he kissed back it was needy and hard, but no longer desperate or scared.

Jean hummed his approval as Marco curled his tongue between Eren’s parted lips, and Eren drew in a long, deep breath through his nose, sinking into Marco’s embrace. Marco relaxed himself, finally letting himself get lost in Eren’s kisses and Jean’s long fingers trailing through his hair.

He didn’t let it go on long, though, before he drew back gently, nuzzling Eren’s check until he looked up, blinking curiously. Marco resorted to finger-spelling, cursing his painfully rudimentary sign language.

_U O K?_

Eren’s eyes softened and he actually smiled when he nodded. Jean sat up and signed a question, speaking aloud for a grateful Marco’s benefit.

“How’s your head feel, sweetheart?” Eren replied with a complicated gesture, and it took Jean a moment to rephrase it aloud.

“ _The outside feels fine,”_ he translated with an exasperated huff.

“Aw, _Eren…”_ Marco wrapped his arms tight around Eren’s shoulders, kissing his temples around the edges of the bandages.

“What do you need?” Jean asked. Eren responded by curling back into Marco’s side and tugging Jean down with him. He twisted to kiss Jean over his shoulder, deep and firm and loving, and Jean spread his fingers warmly over Eren’s ribs. Marco dipped his head to nibble at Eren’s earlobe, smiling when he was rewarded with a heavy shiver.

When Jean consented to let him go, Eren leaned back in to find Marco’s lips, tangling their legs together and pressing in close. He cupped a hand against Marco’s cheek, thumb resting gingerly just below the bruising split. Marco covered Eren’s hand with his own. He twined their fingers together and kissed him deep and forgiving, and Eren simply melted in his arms.

Jean pressed close against Eren’s back, lavishing attention and love across his neck and shoulders. Eren gasped into Marco’s mouth, and his kisses turned clinging and just shy of desperate, hands dropping to Marco’s hips and squeezing tight. Jean slid an arm between them, running his hands in heavy strokes up Eren’s belly and his chest, playing across his collarbones before sliding down to tease the curve of his hips.

When Jean leaned up to close his lips around an earlobe, swirling his tongue across it, and when Marco smoothed his hands down Eren’s back to curl around his ass, Eren broke away from Marco’s lips and buried his face in his shoulder with a shudder.

Marco raised his eyebrows as Eren quivered against him, hips shifting, and he muffled a telltale shivering moan (the first sound he’d made since he cried in Jean’s arms the night before) against the curve of Marco’s neck.

“’m glad he’s facing you,” Jean said, using his teeth against an earlobe to wring another shiver out of his boneless boyfriend. “That sounded sticky.”

Eren grumped a loud, embarrassed grump and flopped his arms over Marco’s shoulders, hiding in his neck. Marco giggled, nuzzling the sliver of Eren’s face that he could reach.

“Hey. Hey there, Mr. Stamina,” Jean teased, nudging Eren’s chin up to sign to him. “You okay?”

Eren responded by dropping his full weight on him for a messy, boneless kiss (sharing some of the sticky between them) before he rolled out of bed and wobbled into the bathroom. A second later, the sound of water splashing drifted out. Jean and Marco exchanged a grin.

“I suppose we can’t tease him _too_ much…”

“Oh we can tease him a little.” Jean reached lazily for Marco, and Marco rolled closer to cuddle into his side, careful of his bruised ribs.

“How do _you_ feel, hm?” Marco asked, stroking Jean’s muddy, half-dyed hair. Jean just shook his head.

“Don’ worry about me. I’m not important—“

“Don’t say that…” Marco cut him off with a hand on his cheek. “Don’t ever say that, beautiful. You’ve been so incredible…” he curled his arms around Jean’s waist, dropping kisses against his eyelids. “Braver than the two of us times ten.”

Jean whined at him, cheeks pink, and pressed their lips together to prevent him from saying something else embarrassing. A few minutes later, Eren crash landed at Marco’s back, draped in Marco’s pink and teal t-shirt and looking agonizingly adorable. He flopped a heavy arm across both their waists and planted his face in the dip between Marco’s shoulder blades with a sleepy mumble. The first snore followed a moment later.

_The first time Eren and Marco shared a bed was an accident._

_It was also months before the adrenaline-fueled night in a presidential suite a few miles from a cathedral with a corruption problem. Jean chased them into Eren’s cozy basement bedroom, yelling something about branch trunking algorithms, and Marco quite simply dozed off in a ball at the foot of Eren’s futon mattress, somewhere around the second season of Hannibal._

_It was the first time he could remember sleeping through the night._

_He might have woken up once, he wasn’t sure if the jolt of panic had pushed him into consciousness or just skimmed along with the familiar nightmares...but something about the presence of another warm body, just a few feet away, soft warm breaths and Eren mumbling as he shifted, chased away the shaking sleeplessness._

_When he woke completely, it was to sun streaming in through the high, small window and one of Eren’s blankets tucked around his shoulders...and it felt like home._ Someone’s _home at least, even if he still wouldn’t let himself believe it was his._

 _After that, well...Marco made excuses. The first time was an accident, so the accidents just...continued. He’d ruefully claim jetlag and cold weather to_ _explain away his presence at the foot of Eren’s bed, the morning after he’d_ _felt a bad night coming on._

 _He couldn’t tell if Jean noticed. Jean_ must _have noticed, he was far too quick, too sharp to miss Marco’s presence in his lover’s bedroom one night out of three. But he never said a_ _word. Some mornings Marco even though he smiled faintly, handing him a mug of_ _coffee after he’d crept unobtrusively out of Eren’s room._

 _But the uncertainty built up, along with the culture shock and the homesickness and the constant, gnawing fear. He couldn’t shake the inevitable feeling that he’d break them somehow, that if anything could drive a wedge into Jean and Eren’s unlabeled, easy, bone deep love. it would be him._ _And he still couldn’t sleep alone, not without all the panic building up and swallowing him whole._

_The first week of August found him curled in on himself in Eren’s bed, biting his knuckles til they bled to muffle his wracking sobs. He’d learned by then that Eren slept like a particularly dead log, but it seemed like he’d shifted a little that night. They’d started out with a comfortable space between them, but curling forward now left Marco with his throbbing forehead nestled in the dip between Eren’s shoulder blades, the warmth of his skin soothing the ache._

_He didn’t remember drifting off at last (crying himself to sleep like a fucking child) but he woke up alone, late in the morning. It was his practice on those mornings to lurk in the stairs for a few minutes, before slipping out of the basement. There was noise from the kitchen, Jean and Eren rattling around, Jean’s voice—_

_“Did Marco sleep in your room last night?”_

_“Mhm,” Eren mumbled around a mouthful of something, and Marco froze solid in the stairwell._

Here it comes, here it all comes again, you’re cheating on me he’s broken us broken it all, I hate you I never want to see you again he’s a curse he destroys everything he touches—

“ _Good.” Jean huffed, and Marco could hear him shifting restlessly, the way he did when he was trying not to get emotional. “I heard him cryin’ last night…I’d hate to think he was alone.”_

_“Yeah, he was with me. Pretended to be asleep…I didn’t wanna embarrass him, y’know?” Eren sighed. “Now I wish I’d just rolled over and hugged him.”_

_“Think he’ll tell us about it?” Jean asked._

_“When he’s ready.”_

_“Yeah.”_

_Marco stayed in the stairwell a long time, until his breathing was under control and his eyes were a little less glassy. Jean and Eren just smiled at him when he cautiously emerged. Jean glanced at his hands and slipped away upstairs as Eren started brewing more coffee. Five minutes later, Jean plonked his first aid kid down on the table, grabbed Marco’s hands, and began cleaning the bites in his fingers with exacting care._

_That night, Jean and Eren both turned up in the room Marco had inherited from Levi, with a pot of tea and a stack of movies, and the scent of baking cinnamon rolls filling the house. They made themselves comfortable on his creaky queen bed, Eren sprawled on his stomach and Jean curled up like a cat close to Marco’s side._

_“It’s getting late,” Marco said around midnight, cautious and casual. “Are you thinkin’ bed, or…?” he trailed off awkwardly, and Eren sat up and regarded him, head on one side._

_“You don’t gotta pretend, you know,” he said softly._

_“Huh? I—“_

_“I mean, if you wanna go to sleep, kick us out, no problem. But…” Eren hesitated, tugging at a strand of hair tangled around his implants. “If you want us to stay, or if you wanna come crash with me…you don’t have to pretend.”_

_“Eren…” Marco began, with no idea what he was about to say._

_“I know what it’s like to be scared to fall asleep, okay?” Eren said. “We both do.” Jean uncurled and nodded vigorously, amber eyes searching Marco’s face. “You don’t have to explain, not if you aren’t ready, but_ you don’t have to pretend.”

_Marco fell asleep between them that night, head nestled near the curve of Eren’s stomach. He knew Jean was a night owl, Jean hardly ever slept, but he’d pillowed his cheek on Marco’s thigh and grumped at him until Eren explained he wanted his head petted. And then he’d gone out like a light, smiling and purring as Marco stroked his absurdly soft hair, and Eren watched them with an expression like his heart was melting._

_A week later, Eren wandered through the kitchen and found Marco staring at a Chinese takeout menu covered in Jean’s complicated fraction algebra, tears dripping off his chin, and Marco knew he was in love._

He’d hoped that by some miracle, he’d be able to fall asleep before it all caught up to him. He’d hoped that their presence, Jean and Eren, his boys, his protectors, the loves of his life, would help to hold it all back.

In the end, it just made it worse.

Every time he shut his eyes he saw Eren’s face etched against the darkness, bloody and furious and mad with pain and al his fault. Over and over he saw Eren’s fist slam up into his cheekbone, and over and over he let the blow land.

Forgiving Eren was easy. There was nothing to forgive, just a bruise and a few drops of blood. But seeing Eren forgive _him,_ crawl into his arms and kiss his cheeks, his beautiful eyes so full of love and trust…that was hard. That _hurt,_ letting Jean and Eren kiss him with all the love he didn’t deserve.

 _I love them,_ he thought, shutting his eyes tight against the dark. _I love them, I’ll trust them, I’ll tell them when I’m ready._

Liar

 _I’ll tell them, I’ll_ tell _them, the whole thing, about the airplane and Maura and Clare and the skytracer, I’ll tell them._

Liar

_They’ll listen._

Liar

_They’ll still love me._

**Liar**

_I trust them._

**Liar**. Liar, liar, liar.

_You don’t trust them at all._

_Levi let the call be yours, and you left him in the dark. You can pretend you didn’t tell him about the vest because you didn’t think he’d ever need it, but that’s not true at all. You felt it going bad, and you lied to him anyway._

_You didn’t trust him and you let him watch Jean die, left him waiting every second for those bullets to come back. You didn’t trust him because he’s_ good, _he’s too good for a creature like you. You trusted Hitch, you let her walk away in the dark and put five bullets into both their hearts, ‘cause she’s a liar just like you._

_Those bullets are on you, you you you, this is what there is for things like you, bullets and blood and the broken bits of everything you’ve ever touched._

_Liar liar world’s on fire, your story’s as twisted as a telephone wire—_

“Marco…”

Marco’s breath stuttered, he’d been leaning into Eren’s back once more, but Eren turned in his arms, his arms wrapped tight around his neck, and he pressed his warm face into Marco’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Marco,” he whispered. His voice sounded odd without his implants, deep and raspy and a little slurred around the edges. _Don’t worry when he doesn’t talk,_ Jean had whispered to him, while Eren was in the bathroom. _He doesn’t like talking when he can’t hear himself, says it’s too weird. It’s not a big deal, he’ll just stick to ASL when he can._ But it was pitch black now, and Eren held Marco tight and whispered in his ear as Jean shifted behind him, his arms winding around Marco’s waist.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry...Marco, God, I forgot...I didn’t think what it must have been like for you.

“Eren...don’t...I’m not hurt…”

“Of _course_ you’re hurt,” Jean whispered, his voice was choked and his cheek felt wet where he leaned it into Marco’s. “ _Fuck,_ of course you are, oh Marco...you’ve been through just as much hell as we have and we didn’t even think…”

Eren couldn’t hear them, but it didn’t seem to matter; it had been years since he and Jean had needed words to talk in any case. The two of them just wrapped Marco in their arms, trailing kisses over everything they could find in the dark.

“We should’ve known,” Eren whispered, nudging his lips against Marco’s. “Got too wrapped up letting you put us back together to realize you needed to fall apart...I’m so sorry, Marco, it shouldn’t have gone like this at all.”

“You needed me…” Marco said helplessly, and he felt Jean reach around to find Eren’s hands and translate for him.

“‘Course we needed you,” Jean murmured into his neck, punctuating it with another kiss. “We _always_ need  you...God, Marco,”

 _“Don’t you know what you_ are _to us?”_

_Jean’s fingers tightened in his hair, thumbs stroking soothing circles over his temples as he stared into his eyes._

_“C’mon, Marco, sweetheart, don’t cry, please don’t cry. You’re not powerless, you can’t ever be powerless when you’re with us, we_ love _you--”_

_All three of them froze, but just for a second before Eren was nodding vigorously, sitting up to throw his arms around Marco’s neck despite the awkward angle. Jean’s eyes bugged almost comically as his brain caught up to his mouth, but he bit his lip and met Marco’s eyes squarely, refusing to back down from the word they’d never dared to use between the three of them._

_“We_ love _you, okay, we have for a long time, you’ve_ gotta _know that --_ why are you crying harder?!” _Jean cried helplessly, and Marco just buried his face in his chest and clung to him, smiling through his sobs._

_“I love you too, I love you I love you I love you so much, Jean--Eren--”_

_“I love you, Marco,” Eren whispered in his ear, leaning over his shoulder to kiss the corner of his mouth, and Marco shivered between them. “I love you._ We _love you.”_

 _“_ You’re ours, and we’ll never stop loving you.”

Marco turned in their one king bed, reaching behind him to kiss Jean over his shoulder, pulling Eren closer to his chest. “I love you.”

_I love them. (liar) I trust them. (liar) ’ll tell them one day. I’ll tell them when I’m ready. (liar)_

_They’ll still love me._

_They’ll still love me, they’ll still love me, they’ll still--_

  


 

 

 

 

 

 

_(liar)_


	7. Lock and Key

**Interlude**

**The Angel at the Gate**

_He’s breathing smoke._

_He tastes it in the back of his throat, rasping in with every breath of frigid air. He zips his thin sweatshirt up and pulls his hands into the sleeves: it’s_ cold  _huddled behind the thick stone walls, without the sweat from running and the heat of the fires. He wishes, for a second, that he hadn’t given away his scarf._

_Instead, he just turtles down into the neck of his hoodie and pulls his knees up tight against his chest, and watches the fires burn behind the gates of Heaven._

_He’s never been inside the church before. The huge arched window is covered from the outside, hidden behind a thick, barred pane of safety glass: just a big white blob behind its muddy armor._

_He didn’t know that the stained glass window showed the gates of Heaven, a towering arch of white and gold and silver scrolls looming up the wall behind the altar, guarded by a white-robed angel._

_The noise of the riots outside roars louder,_ pop-pop-pop  _of rubber pullets cracking off the roads. The big kid peering through a crack in the door recoils, wincing. He drags a heavy pew across the door and huddles down beside it shivering. Near the altar, someone whimpers softly._

_The angel at the gate watches it all in silence. He doesn’t have much of a face, just two simple oval eyes, glowing slivers of golden glass that matched the trumpet in his hands. He looks a live with the light of the fires dancing behind him, shadows move as his robe drifts in the breeze, his eyes flicker and shift, bright and sharp. Watching._

Open the gate,  _he thinks, staring up into the angel’s golden eyes. He’s never prayed before, he was raised with his father’s bitter, open scorn of praying… but maybe this is all it is. Not the ritual, the mechanic recitation his father loves to mock every time he leaves for the church. Not the kneeling and the clasped hands and the books of antiquated lines…just this. Opening up his heart and mind to_ something,  _something up there, a point of light in the shadows far beyond him…turning his face up and hoping with all his might, offering himself up to anything that might be there to answer._

Open the gate.  _He can picture it with open eyes, the angel raising his trumpet to his lips and blowing, one long clear note to cut across the muffled screams beyond the walls. The angel blows his trumpet and the white glass gates swing open, open a door in the window with no fire beyond it, no people in uniform or cars overturned, no one pointing at the church and screaming at him to run…_ Open the gate  _and they’ll all walk through, he can see his gold-eyed angel waiting for him on the other side, holding out his hands, if he could only reach the angel’s hands all this will be behind him, everything will be better, his chance to be free of this burning, dusty, choking hell—_

_There’s another explosion, closer this time, light flares bright behind the window, and lances down through the angel’s wings, picked out in silver wire on the glass. He feels the angel watching him, two points of golden light locking on his face before the first crack shoots across the glass._

_Just one crack at first, up the center of Heaven’s gates, his heart thrills in his chest that the angel heard him, that the gates are opening, that his angel’s waiting…and the crack keeps spreading, over the gates, branching out, lancing through the angel’s eyes and the glowing gold goes dim as his face begins to splinter—_

_And before he can think to turn and run, the Gates of Heaven shatter in a wave, a waterfall of broken glass that crashes down around his head._

**Part II**

**Lock and Key**

South Dakota had a very particular way of doing summers, Eren thought as he slouched through gray corridors, shaking dust out of his hair. It was hot, hotter than Minnesota, but where Minnesota was all buggy humidity and mud, South Dakota was dry dust and flash floods and  _wind_ like nothing he’d ever felt before. Jean and Marco had laughed themselves sick the first time he’d stumbled in out of the gales for a Skype call, with a hairdo that would do a Super Saiyan proud.

Still, he liked South Dakota. He liked the Black Hills, he liked the rivers, he liked the red and orange rocks when they weren’t blowing with stinging dust. He even liked Ellsworth, the ramby sprawling air force base at the foot of the hills. He’d even been pleasantly surprised to learn he liked teaching. He could be pretty happy here…if it wasn’t so damn far away. So damn lonely.

Levi had dredged up this job as a challenge, he knew it. A challenge to all three of them, but especially to him. Ellsworth Airforce running an eight week course in lip reading, signal communication, and sign language. They need an instructor. The potential paycheck had rendered them all speechless. To anyone else it looked like a dream, a lucrative two month vacation. But to the three of them, it was a challenge.  _Prove to me you can operate on your own. Prove to me you’re independent_

Levi wouldn’t push it. He was careful. The shadow of Oberlin still loomed long and dark over all of them (Eren traced an idle finger around the silver-blue disc of a new implant, held tight to his head by a magnet, the outdated steel screws of his old CI’s long gone.) He wouldn’t push their trust in him when it was already strained. But he’d still challenge them.

“Hey, Eren!” Eren looked up, and acknowledged the shout with an exaggerated nod, since the file box in his arms kept him from waving.

“Hey, Tori.”

Tori Reiss was one of his students, a tiny blonde corporal of unspecific specialty who three quarters of the base harbored a crush on.

“You coming to practice tonight? Ymir wants a rematch.”

“I gotta clean out my classroom,” Eren replied with a beleaguered shrug. He’d love to make it the base’s informal sparring session – he needed the distraction – but the officers needed his windowless classroom thoroughly stripped and ready for the next roaming instructor to arrive.

“ _Booo.”_ Tori sighed, winding her waterfall of silver blonde hair into a loose knot at the base of her neck. “Lame of you. By the way, Mina’s looking for you.”

“She knows where to find me.”

Eren shouldered through a door and dumped the heavy file-box at the foot of the narrow bed that had been his for the last two months. There were three more like it still in his classroom, but…fuck it, they could wait.

Eren woke up his laptop and flopped flat on his face across the gray and blue comforter. It had been washed a few too many times since his arrival, but if he buried his face deep enough in its soft folds, he could sometimes convince himself it still smelled like Jean and Marco.

He rolled onto his back with a heavy sigh, thumbing through his depressingly notification-free phone. Must be a boring day back home in Minnesota…normally his boys kept him up to date with  _piles_ of texts and snapchats, making his phone vibrate warmly in his pocket while he lectured about differentiating consonants.

There was just one today: Jean sent him a snap of the dirty dishes piled in the sink, captioned with an unhappy keyboard smash, and Eren smiled anyway. Those two were absolutely  _helpless_ as housekeepers. He was gonna have to redo all of Jean’s feeble attempts at cleaning the second he got home. They couldn’t properly make a bed between them. God, he loved them.

Eren sighed, curling onto his side, and opened his backup plan, the photo gallery full of screencaps and picture messages he’d squirreled away during his two-month absence. The sexy ones had their own folder, somewhere it was hard to open by accident. And they were wonderful,  _obviously,_ (especially the day Marco had introduced Jean to the magic of bullet vibrators) but they hadn’t seen much daylight lately. It was a different set of pictures he kept flipping back through, the little stuff, the  _boring_ stuff as his boys narrated their days to him and he realized how much he took for granted, just having them  _there…_

His laptop blooped at him from the end of his bed, and Eren bolted upright, slightly disgusted to find his eyes stinging. He smiled at the notification: Incoming call, Jean KirschFINE. Sometimes he’d swear that boy was just a little psychic.

When the window blinked to life, he was greeted by a blob of blankets and a single visible tuft of blond hair.

“Long day, baby?”

The blanket, the absurdly soft and slightly threadbare broken star blanket he’d had since he was little, moaned at him.

“Yeah, me too.” Eren curled around his laptop and propped his head on his hand, fingers playing idly with the strands of hair around his hears that were still a little shorter than the rest. “I’ve gotta grade all these final evals…wanna keep me company in my suffering?” He scanned the edges of the frame, around the lump of alpaca wool and Jean. “Where’s Kiwi?”

“He  _left_ me.”

“He left you?” Eren started to grin.

“ _Abandoned_ me, all alone ‘n it’s all cold and rainy and nobody’s  _petting_ me…”

“He’s gone for good and never coming back, isn’t he?”

The lump shifted, and Eren finally got a glare from one amber eye. “So maybe he’s getting groceries…”

“Poor l’il toad,” Eren giggled. Jean grinned himself, and sat up, shaking the blanket back off his head and pulling it around his shoulders. “ _Hey,_ your hair’s back to normal!”

“Marco  _finally_ let me dye it again.” Jean smiled, running his fingers through his bangs, which were once again ash-blond instead of the muddy, half-dyed brown Eren had almost gotten used to. “I didn’t realize how  _long_ it’d gotten.”

“Looks cute,” Eren murmured.  _He_ hadn’t realized how long Jean’s hair had gotten either…it’d still looked short and fluffy when he’d left Minnesota. “Raining, huh? Wish I was there. We could go sit on the porch and snuggle.”

“ _Snuggle,_ huh?” Jean slipped his glasses up into his hair and leaned his chin on both hands, a slow, teasing smile curling his lips. “Is  _that_ all you want?”

“ _You’re_ in a mood.” Eren leaned closer, smiling back into his webcam.

“Two  _months,_ Eren,” Jean moaned, flopping onto his back. “I wanna kiss you again…”

“ _Kiss,_ huh?” Eren mimicked, echoing Jean’s teasing drawl. He sometimes sounded downright Texan when he was being a tease.

“Among other things,” Jean said, with that slow, knowing smile.

And that was Oberlin too, Eren thought. That smile, the poise…the  _confidence,_ like some part of Jean’s Marlowe Song persona had stuck with him. It left Eren warm and flutter-hearted every time he saw it. It didn’t matter what kind of shit the universe found to throw at Jean Kirschtein. Everything he survived just made him stronger.

“What  _kind_ of other things?” Eren pitched his voice intentionally low, fingers wandering towards the waistband of his pants, and Jean blushed and squirmed, reaching up to adjust his screen.

Someone pounded on the door of his little barrack room, and Eren yelped, jostling his computer. Jean buried his head in his arms and moaned.

“Hey, Jaeger! Lemme in!”

Eren moaned. “Be right back, babe. She’ll kick the door in if I don’t open it.”

Jean perked up. “Is that—“

“Your timing’s fabulous as always, Mina,” Eren muttered, jerking the door open and breathing a silent prayer of thanks that his shirt was long enough to hide any persistent chubbage.

Mina Carolina, his fellow temporary instructor and therefore neighbor in the NCO barracks, leaned on the doorframe and grinned. “What’d I interrupt? You were just gonna sit in here and grade and sulk all night—“ she caught site of the laptop on his bed, and the grin turned evil. “Oh, maybe I  _did_ interrupt…”

“Hey Mina!” Jean waved vigorously from the screen. “He was  _definitely_ gonna sit in here and sulk all night.”

“Jean! Your hair’s adorable!” Mina walked right past Eren and perched on the edge of his bed. She was out of uniform, wearing shorts and a black tank top that showed off her muscular arms, a pair of sunglasses on her head holding back her glossy hair.

“Says the woman with the most beautiful hair in the world,” Jean retorted. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it down before.”

“It  _does_ look good,” Eren said, resigning himself to the invasion and flopping down beside her. “I always forget how  _long_ it is when you don’t have it braided.”

“Yeah, I need to cut it,” Mina laughed, trailing her fingers through the strands that hung over her shoulders. “Where’s Lord of the Rings?”

Eren tuned out as Jean commenced moaning about his abandonment again. He’d met Mina his first week on the base, when he was still homesick and lost and  _extremely_ uncertain about having not one, but  _two_ boyfriends while living on a military base in rural South Dakota.  He’d had a heart attack when she glanced over his shoulder and seen his laptop’s desktop – still a picture of Jean and Marco, perched on the roof of the old farmhouse and waving down at them. She’d just smiled and asked if one of them was his boyfriend…and when his silence lasted just a  _second_ too long, clapped both hands over her mouth and gasped “Oh, you’re  _poly!”_ with genuine delight. She’d demanded to be introduced, via Skype, and Jean and Marco had been trying to convince him to smuggle her home in his suitcase ever since. 

He had no doubt that Mina's influence was most of the reason no one else had said a word, once his sexuality (if not his polyamorous love live) had worked its way into common knowledge. She wasn't a local officer, but she was still an officer, and an unarmed combat specialist who commanded serious respect. She'd half-adopted him, watchful and protective from the day he arrived, and Eren was pathetically grateful.

He tuned back in when to Mina saying “ _Anyway,_ say hi to Marco, but we’ve gotta get going—“

“ _We?”_ Eren was instantly alert and suspicious. Mina grinned at him.

“Well, since you managed to dodge all attempts to get you to your going away party sneakily, I’ve been instructed to bring you by any means necessary.” Eren moaned at her. “Now, are you coming peacefully, or am I throwing you over my shoulder and walking out of here?”

“I’m  _coming…_ ”

“I’d better go too…” Jean glanced at his watch. “Thursday…can’t be late.”

 _Thursday…_ Eren thought.  _Oh._ “You’re going back to—“

“Yeah.” Jean sighed.

“Know when you’ll be back.”

“Late,” Jean shrugged. “’s a long drive, even if they  _don’t_ decide to sweep my car again…blugh. I’ll see you soon, love.”

After they’d signed off with Jean, Mina ducked into her own room and came back out with a white glass baking dish, covered with a snap-on lid. “Before we go, cause I know you want to start driving tonight…these are for you. For the road.”

Eren cracked the lid, and grinned as the smell hit him. “You made cookies?”

“My mom’s mint-chocolate chips. For  _real_ this time. Y’know, not trying to use Splenda packets because we forgot to buy sugar.”

“Ulgh. Do not speak of that disaster. Thanks, Mina.” Eren tucked the dish under his arm and hugged her tight, knowing he might not get the chance once they were surrounded by his students and the rest of his martial arts friends. “I’m gonna miss you, you know that?”

She ruffled his hair. “I know,” she said, with just a hint of Han Solo gruffness. “We’ll stay in touch. And at least  _half_ of those are for Jean and Marco, you hear me? No eating the entire first layer before you get home.”

“I make no promises,” Eren grinned, letting her drag him out the door for his last night in South Dakota.

* * *

Truth be told, it was only ninety minutes or so from Rochester to Shakopee, just south of the Twin Cities. If you drove the speed limit. Jean made it in just under seventy, wet roads and all. The Women’s Correctional Facility wasn’t very forgiving to latecomers at visiting hours.

He grumbled to himself, sweating in their old car’s feeble air conditioning as the guards took their sweet time in buzzing him through the succession of sliding metal gates. No matter how many times he did this, his heart always jumped straight into his throat when they slammed behind him with a loud buzz of electronic locks.  _Rat in a trap, rat in a trap, rat in a trap…_ he swallowed the nauseous anxiety as a bored guard waved him out of the car and towards the first set of person-sized gates.  _Suck it the fuck up, Kirschtein, at least_ you  _get to walk out of here at the end of the night._

He hadn’t been in this particular wing of the prison before. There were fewer gates, bigger windows, less looming claustrophobia, but he still felt the cameras on him, and his stomach still lurched with every slam and buzz of the doors.

The lobby outside the visiting room was still depressingly full. Husbands, boyfriends, parents, probably a few girlfriends…and too many kids. A little girl holding an older woman’s hand waved shyly at him, and Jean smiled at her before her (presumably) grandmother pulled her away with a glare. Jean turned his eyes front with a sigh, and almost smacked into a very familiar face.

“Armin!” Jean took a step back and grinned. “So  _that’s_ how she ended up in minimum security.”

“Wasn’t fahkin’ easy, either.” Armin Arlert returned the grin, already peeling his visitor’s badge ( _Legal Council)_ off and stuffing it in a pocket of his very well-cut suit. Jean would never get sick of listening to him swear. It was all so much more… _swear-y_  in a Dublin accent. “It’s better here. A  _lot_ better. Freedom of movement, more time outside…if we gotta play the waiting game, at least she can do it somewhere with a basketball hoop.”

Jean’s fingers strayed to his chest, just above his heart. “You know we can still—“

“ _Don’t,_ Jean.” There was real warning in the young lawyer’s tone, and Jean looked away, chewing his lip. “You know that’s not an option. Not yet. Not for a long time.”

“Erwin still hasn’t—“

“ _Jean.”_ Armin’s eyes narrowed in frustration. Then he sighed and lowered his voice, expression softening. “No. Not yet. He’s still trying to make contact with…talk to someone north of the DMZ. So  _not. Yet.”_ His sharp eyes strayed to a pink corner of cardboard, poking out of Jean’s jacket. “Is that--?”

Jean glanced around automatically, cursed himself for doing something so obviously shifty, and then nodded, pulling a generic birthday card half out of his pocket. Armin sighed.

“That’s somethin’ then, right? Erwin’s back in the country tomorrow, you’ll know what I know then. When’s Eren--?”

“Saturday. Two days.” Jean grinned despite his surroundings, and Armin clapped him on the shoulder.

“ _Dreyse, party of one,”_ crackled the intercom near the door, and Jean nodded to Armin and hurried over.

“Name and relation?” Asked the tired-looking woman behind the glass, not bothering to look up from her clipboard.

“Dreyse. Brother.  _Half_ brother,” he amended acidly, when she raised her eyes at his distinctly Asian features.

“Any properties?”

Jean handed the birthday card over, and she gave it a quick, disinterested shake. Most of the inside of the card was covered in dense, blocky Korean characters, but the greeting was in English.  _Dear Henri…_

“Her birthday is in December,” the guard commented as she ran her hands down the outsides of his legs and checked his pockets.

“Our grandma’s memory isn’t what it used to be,” Jean said blandly, and the guard just grunted and waved him through.

Minimum security didn’t have the long pane of glass, the stools and telephones he’d seen before. It was just…a room, a jumble of scarred tables and plastic chairs and a babble of conversation, between people carefully maintaining the required distance.

He was pretty sure the smile on Hitch’s face when she saw him was genuine. It had been a few weeks since he’d been able to make it to Shakopee, while she was snarled up in the middle of Armin (and therefore Erwin’s) bit to get her transferred to minimum. Her hair was growing out, tied up at the back of her neck in a jumble of cookie-dough colored curls. She’d even gotten her hands on eyeshadow again, cheap and powdery, and in a generic baby blue that didn’t suit her celery-colored eyes. And even from a distance he could see she’d lost weight.

“What the hell are you doing here, kid?” she said, like she always did, by way of greeting. “So  _that’s_ what you look like blond. I don’t like it.”

“Did your hairstyle happen on purpose, or are you smuggling squirrels?” Jean said conversationally, settling into the chair across from her.

“Squirrel-Girl of Shakopee…nice. You’ve got a movie there.” Hitch mused. They smiled at each other. This was only round one. The warm up.

“So…new lawyer, eh?”

“That little Irish psycho? Strikes me as the kind of guy who’s gonna snap and murder twenty people with a mechanical pencil one day. I like him.”

“You’d better. How many murder-in-the-first-degrees get minimum security after a month?”

“It’s aggravated assault now,” Hitch said with a smirk. “Can’t deny he’s good at what he does.”

The smirk was her mistake. She couldn’t do smugness yet, not without the cracks starting to show in the corners of her expression. This harsh mask didn’t suit her, any more than the smooth professional polish of Marlowe Song’s manager. She’d slipped, just a little…and that meant he could too.

“I brought you something.” Jean set the birthday card down on the table and withdrew his hand with exaggerated carefulness, casting a glance towards the guard in the corner. “From grandma.”

Her eyes narrowed with suspicion for a moment, until she picked up the card. Jean actually looked away when her expression changed, raw and wrecked.

“He actually signed it ‘Grandma,’” she whispered, with a soft, choked noise that wanted desperately to be a laugh. “ _God…”_

“It won’t be forever,” Jean whispered, leaning forward. He knew the guard’s eyes would be on them now. “It’ll be  _done_ one day, it’ll be  _over,_ and we’ll tell them everything. That you never actually –“ he tapped his fingers over his chest, over the four faint pockmarks in his skin. Hitch didn’t meet his eyes.

“It’s a sweet dream, Jean,” she said softly. “It’s sweet you think there’s such a thing as  _over,_ outside of stories. People like us, we don’t get  _over.”_

 _People like us,_ Jean thought.  _She sounds just like Marco when he talks in his sleep._

“Dreyse! Ten minutes.”

“The flowers are from me,” Jean said, forced casual, sitting back. Hitch shot him a look, and then glanced down at the slightly raised pink flowers on the inside of the card. She ran a nail over one petal, and it peeled away, revealing a narrow pocket…and three pairs of long false lashes, hidden in the gap between the layers.

This time, he was sure the smile was real.

“I hope I never see you here again,” Hitch called as he stood, and as the guards began shepherding women back through the metal-detector guarded doors.

“Don’t worry,” Jean said, with a smile of his own. This was part of the tradition too. “You will.”

 _Eye shadow,_ he thought, sitting in the small cluster of cars and waiting for the gate to open.  _We’ll get her_ real  _eye shadow next…green, or gold…something that actually matches her eyes…Marco would know what to get._ Prison would try to bury her, melt her down and mold her out the same as every other number on the lines. He wasn’t going to let that happen. The Hitch who’d had his back in Oberlin was all barbs and blades, wore makeup like war paint and wielded her femininity like a weapon. He wouldn’t leave her where she was unarmed.

He let his smuggling plots entertain him, all the way back to Rochester, letting them get sillier and sillier as the sun sank lower, to bury the gnawing anxiety bubbling away in the back of his mind.

 _People like us, we don’t get_ over.

Marco was in bed when he slipped back into the farmhouse. Jean sighed deeply and curled up on the couch, half his brain still taken up with ideas of training squirrels to carry packages, trying to ignore the feeling her words had left him with.

 _People like us, we don’t get_ over.

He rested his head on his arms, eyelids drooping and heart heavy, drowning in the feeling…

 _…we don’t get_ over…

The feeling of something turning, revolving, falling into place…something starting all over again.

* * *

The first thing Eren became aware of was earsplitting squeak, which told his bleary brain that he went to sleep with his sound processors still in, for some damn-fool reason.  And he was on the couch, and the couch had gotten oddly uncomfortable and almost…bony…and then Jean’s arms wrapped around him and he was squeezing Eren against his chest as the blanket tangled around their legs slips to the floor. 

 _“You’re back early!”_ Jean squeaked in his ear, burying his cold nose in Eren’s hair.  “ _You’re back you’re back you’re back—“_

Eren chuckled, squirming closer to drape his arms over Jean’s shoulders.  “Hey, angel.  ‘M home.” 

Jean tipped his face up, arms still crushingly tight around Eren’s waist, and he gave himself over to Jean’s warm, sleepy kisses, months of tension he hadn’t realized he was carrying draining away.  He let himself settle between Jean’s legs, trying to catch some of his weight on his elbows to avoid squishing his weedy boyfriend, and Jean just grumbled against his lips and tugs him down again.  Apparently he was in the mood to be squished.

“Two months is  _too long,”_ Jean murmured when they finally broke apart for air.  Eren cupped his hands around his face and pressed their foreheads together, and Jean was quick to return the gesture –  _Marco’s_ gesture, really, but they’d long ago adopted it between the two of them as well. It was… _fitting,_ for their odd relationship.  _Home’s where he is._

 Jean’s fingers were cold against his neck, and Eren trailed his hands down his slim frame and slipped them under his back, pulling Jean tighter against his chest and trying to warm him up. He had to make up for all the rainstorms when he hadn’t been there to hug him.

“You were asleep at midnight,” he said, as Jean hummed and pressed his face into Eren’s neck, reveling in finally being able to touch him.  “I’m proud.

“Feels like you’re in one piece,” Jean mumbled, his hands running over Eren’s sides and down his back.  Eren rolled his eyes.

“Teachin’ lip reading isn’t exactly a risky occupation.”

“Teaching lip reading on a  _military base,”_ Jean corrected, nudging Eren away so he could sit up on his elbows and look into his face.  “I know you were sparring with Mina. Krav maga, seriously, like you needed  _more_ ways to impact your knuckles…” 

“It was  _just_ sparring, baby. My hands are fine, see? I was careful.”

Jean scowled and grabbed both his hands, gripping Eren’s fingers and bending them carefully back and forth, feeling his joints for swellings. The faint tremor in his fingers barely registered against Eren’s skin: Jean was clearly fighting hard to keep in under control. When he was finally satisfied, he dropped Eren’s hands with a sigh and threw his arms around his neck again, leaning back and tugging Eren down with him. 

“Two months is  _still_ too long.”  There was a hint of a hitch in his voice, and Eren winced and kissed his neck, stroking his fingers through Jean’s hair.  He knew he was thinking the same thing Jean was, the thing they’d painstakingly tiptoed around ever since Levi brought up the posting on the air force base: the two of them hadn’t let themselves be parted for two months as long as they’d known each other. 

They also knew damn well that was half the reason Levi pushed so hard for him to take the job offer. For the six months that had passed since the disaster at Oberlin, Jean and Eren had barely left one another’s sight, and Eren knew Levi was worried. He always worried, that they were too dependent on each other, that they’d take too many risks when the other was in danger. He’d never try to separate them, or drive them apart, but he’d been…pushing, ever since Oberlin, gently trying to nudge them into more independence. Levi had known Eren would fight it as soon as he heard  _eight weeks…_ hell, a year ago he would’ve flat out  _refused_ to leave Jean on his own that long. 

But it wasn’t ago, and he wasn’tleaving Jean alone, not this time.  Jean had Marco now –  _they_ had Marco now, and leaving didn’t feel like abandoning him anymore.  Jean had been fast asleep on the couch when he slipped in through the back door, and he’d barely twitched when Eren decided his bedroom was too far away (and much too empty) and just curled up next to him, and that was good. Jean never slept unless he felt safe, and it seemed Marco’s presence, even in his own room at the back of the house, was enough comfort for him to relax.

They were fine on their own. They really were. But he’d  _missed_ them, missed them so much it was a miserable, physical  _ache_ some days, low in his stomach. He’d spent so much time counting down the days that actually  _being_ home felt surreal, and he gathered Jean in closer to his chest to feel his heartbeat fluttering against his skin, dropping kisses across his face.  It was the kind of romance, of tenderness, that didn’t always come naturally to him, but here and now, Jean squirming under him, his soft breaths changing, faster and shallower, both of them just reveling in finally being  _toget, her,_ _it was the most natural thing in the world._

“It’s not Sunday already, is it?” The muzzy voice in the doorway broke them apart, and Eren whipped his head around, already grinning ear to ear.  Marco leaned against the doorframe, shirtless and tousle-headed and  _clearly_ not fully awake yet…and Eren had apparently been gone long enough to forget just  _how_ gorgeous he was person. 

“I’ll…uh…I’ll come up with breakfast…” Marco mumbled, rubbing his finger under his nose.  “Don’t mind me…”

 “ _Marco—“_

“ _I was afraid of that,”_ Jean whispered.

That was another scar from Oberlin. There were these moments, when Marco found Jean and Eren together, when he’d smile a smile that didn’t reach his eyes and try to slip around them, make excuses to leave them alone. He still expected them to blame him, for Eren’s new implants and the faint, faded scars over Jean’s heart. It was like he was bracing himself, building up scar tissue around his heart against the day they stopped loving him…something Jean and Eren steadfastly refused to do. Eren launched his body half off the couch and managed to snag Marco around the waist as he tried to slip past them into the kitchen.

“ _Get_ back over here you  _dumb kiwi—“_ Marco stumbled at the attack, and Eren pushed the advantage to reel him in.  “I  _missed_ you,” he whispered, tilting his head to nuzzle his nose against Marco’s soft, warm flesh.  “I missed you so much…”

“That uh. That might carry a little more weight if you weren’t smooshing your face into his ass,” Jean commented.

“I missed it too,” Eren said, his voice a little nasal since his nose was squished where he nuzzled into the curve of Marco’s ass.  He could practically  _hear_ Jean rolling his eyes behind him.  “Point is, you are going  _nowhere,_ c’mere…”

Jean scooted back, curling his long legs in to make room so Eren could drag Marco down onto the couch with them.  As soon as he was within reach, Eren twisted around and pulled him close enough to kiss, still mostly sitting in Jean’s lap.  Marco smiled against his lips, and Eren ran his hands down his neck and across his warm, bare shoulders, trying to rub away the tension Marco always seemed to carry with  him. Jean hummed behind them, hips hitching up against Eren’s weight.  He leaned in to nuzzle his lips against Eren’s neck, and slid his hands over his waist.

Eren still had a layer of hoodie to insulate him (and years to get used to Jean’s ice-cube extremities) but when the backs of Jean’s hands grazed across Marco’s bare stomach, he went ramrod stiff, squeaking into Eren’s mouth.

“ _Holycoldshit!”_

“ _Mmmm, warm.”_ Jean flattened his freezing palms against Marco’s stomach, spreading his fingers across his ribs, and Marco squealed louder, trying to flail away in the limited space.

“ _Coldcoldcoldcoldcold—“_

Eren laughed and laced his fingers with Jean’s, shoving both his hands into his hoodie’s kangaroo pocket.  It had the added effect of dragging Jean in close so his chest was pressed to Eren’s back, and he instantly flopped over Eren’s shoulders with a contented noise.

“Nerd.”

“ _Warm.”_ Jean was clearly still mostly asleep.

“Okay Marco, the snowman is contained.  You can come back.”

Marco smiled, but he hesitated, scraping a hand through his hair and tilting his head away, avoiding both their eyes.

“ _Marco.”_ Eren disentangled his fingers from Jean’s and reached for him, catching Marco’s hands, and Marco sighed and relented, relaxing back into his arms.

“Hey.”

“Hi.” 

Eren twined their fingers together and nudged his nose against Marco’s cheek, waiting ‘til he raised his head, meeting Eren’s eyes through the veil of his thick lashes.  “You know I love you, right?”

There was something about the way Marco’s eyes changed, right before he cupped his palms around Eren’s cheeks and tilted his face up to kiss him.  There were times when Marco looks, well… _broken,_ like there was something shattered deep behind his eyes, all jagged edges and splinters tearing into him every time he breathed…and Eren didn’t think he’d ever get tired of telling Marco he loved him and watching all those broken blades melt away, warm and reform and give him back the light in his smile. He’d made the mistake of staying silent once,  _just_ once, the night he’d awoken to Marco’s muffled sobs pressed against his back in a dark hotel room. And he and Jean had promised each other and promised Marco, never again. They’d never let him drift that far away again, not without their love to pull him back.

“I love you too,” Marco sighed.  Jean snuggled up close to Eren’s back, hands still buried in the pockets of his hoodie, dropping lazy kisses along his neck.  “Missed you,” Marco says, and Jean nodded vigorously, resting his chin on Eren’s shoulder. 

Eren rotated and looped an arm around each neck so he could pull his boys in closer, close enough that he could kiss either one of them by turning his head an inch.  Jean worked an arm around his waist, slipping his fingers under the hem of his sweatshirt.  Marco was quick to follow suit, and Eren just went boneless and let himself get tangled up in the two of them.  “’s good to be home.”

“You were home last night, wern’cha?” Marco said with a soft laugh, trailing kisses over the scar that ran up his side of Eren’s neck.

“ _Mmm_ doesn’t count. Not without you here.”

Marco sat back on his heels at that, blinking down at him, and Eren smiled and reached back to cup a hand around the back of his head, sitting up to press their foreheads tight together.  “We’re gonna keep sayin’ it ‘til you believe it, beautiful.  You’re important now.  You’re  _ours._ Part of our lives.”  Marco let out a slow, shaky breath, hands coming up to rest on Eren’s shoulders, and he brushed a quick kiss against his parted lips. “Home’s where  _you_ are. Both of you.”

 _“Hoki mai ki te wā kaingā…”_ Marco replied softly.

“Hm?”

“ _Welcome home,”_ Jean translated, and leans up to nip at Eren’s earlobe, making him jump and shiver and effectively breaking the moment.  Eren shot him a filthy look over his shoulder, and Jean grinned, clearly pleased with himself, sliding his arms around Eren’s waist again. 

“Was  _six_ languages not enough for you?”

“It’s actually surprisingly similar to Korean,” Jean murmured into his neck.  He tugged Eren back around to face him, running his hands over his stomach as they kissed lazily, and Marco sat up behind him and tugged. Eren’s sweatshirt off over his head.  Jean made a strangled noise in the back of his throat, although his hands didn’t stop their lazy wandering over Eren’s chest, and Eren rolled his head to the side and raises his eyebrows at Marco.

“Better?” he asked, looking down at Eren with a wide, teasing grin.

“ _Much_.”  Marco’s grin widened, and he leaned down to kiss him, warm and thorough. Eren arched up into it, reaching back over his head to rest his arms on the back of the couch. Marco trailed his hands up the length of one arm, a firm, tingling trail of heat, and he curled his long fingers around Eren’s wrists, holding them loosely together. Eren arched against the gentle restraint with a ragged gasp, moaning his approval into Marco’s mouth before he could break away to ask.

 Jean stripped his own shirt off and curled back into his side.  Marco wasn’t holding him tight; a pause and a quick twist, and he knew his boyfriend would let him go…but he was also  _deeply_ intrigued by whatever his boys had in mind…especially when Jean’s long, graceful fingers slipped under the waistband of his pants with gentle, teasing touches.  _Conspiring against me,_ he thought, without the faintest bit of displeasure, letting Marco fuck his tongue into his mouth.

 Eren sank his teeth into his lip, letting his head fall back against his arms and Jean grinned and kneed him in the side, urging him to lift his hips and let Jean shove his pants down his thighs.

“Good to see you too,” Jean said, to Eren’s dick, which bounced out eagerly against his stomach.

“You’re such a  _d-d-dork, ohmyGod mmmm—“_

“You know you love it.” Jean leaned up to brush his lips across Eren’s, then Marco’s.  The hand not curled lovingly around the base of Eren’s dick rubbed over his shoulders, checking for any tension Eren might not notice, and Eren  _almost_ had the presence of mind to roll his eyes at him. 

Instead, he just stretched against Marco’s hold on his wrists, straining up to catch Jean’s lips, the teasing, barely there touches already fraying his patience.  Jean allowed him one quick, rough kiss before he leaned back, tongue darting across his flushing lips, and Eren moaned at him in frustration. Jean  _finally_ fisted his cock with a firm grip and pumped him, fast and hard…for about four strokes, and then he pulled his hand away, unbuttoning the jeans he’d slept in as Eren arched after him with a half-delirious groan, teeth tearing into his lower lip.

“You look so  _cute_ when you do that,” Marco murmured, lips brushing against his ear. “With your spikey teeth ‘n your d-dimples, God…” His hand settled on Eren’s shoulder and he gently nudged him up, letting his arms loose.  Eren let Marco turn him, swinging a leg over Jean’s thighs as Jean lay back against the arm of the couch, Eren more or less sitting in his lap. 

“God, I love the way he wants you,” Marco whispered, sliding his hands warm and firm down his sides and curling his fingers around Eren’s hips.  “Just talkin’ about you makes his eyes turn all dark like that, y’know? He kept telling me, all the things he wanted to do when you got home, how much he needed you…” Marco paused around a shuddering sigh, nipping at Eren’s earlobe. “ _Eren…_ the things you two do to me…”

The only response Eren could manage was a strangled whine between his teeth, bringing one hand back to tangle in Marco’s hair as Marco rolled his hips lazily against his ass, still murmuring suggestions against his ear and Eren was becoming so light-headed with it all he started to wonder if it was possible to just…float off the couch. Jean watched them with rapt attention, idly stroking himself, all teasing gone from his smile: it was nothing but warm and delighted and loving now.  Marco smoothed a palm over Eren’s chest, fingers playing around the edges of the ropey shrapnel scars wrapped around his chest.  (He also kissed the long, deep one on his neck again, but at the moment Eren was prepared to let that damn Harlequin cliché slide.)

“C’mon, c’mon baby…” Jean was apparently sick of waiting.  His hands left burning trails of heat up Eren’s thighs and he tugged him down into his lap, both of them gasping and shivering as their erections brushed together.  Eren decided to actually  _use_ his freed hands for once, threading his fingers through Jean’s soft hair, dropping the other between their bodies and their fingers tangled together around their slick arousals. 

Marco hummed and plasters himself against Eren’s back; he’d lost his pants somewhere in there and Eren ground shamelessly back against him before riding foreward into Jean’s calloused palm.  Jean arched into it, leaning in to kiss Marco warm and messy over Eren’s shoulder, and after all the teasing he was already fighting down the tuggings of an orgasm building up low in his belly. 

Marco trailed a hand down his back, over the swell of his ass, dipping between the cheeks and Eren shivered  _hard_ again, letting his head fall back against Marco’s shoulder.  “Mmmm,  _fuck,_ Marco…”

“Literally?” Marco said with a faint chuckle. Eren blinked at him, and Jean went still, raising his eyebrows with a grin.

“Why the  _hell_ not.  Where’s the lube?”

“It’s…uh…” Jean dug the heel of his hand into his eye with a groan.  “In the  _car_ still, shit.”  All three of them sagged briefly.  Jarred back to reality. 

“In the  _car?”_ Eren asked with a giant grin of his own. “I didn’t get Snapchats of  _that_ one.”

“It was  _deeply_ failed experiment,” Jean muttered, scraping a hand through his sweaty hair. “Your car’s too fuckin’ tiny to actually  _do_ anything.”

“Don’t blame my car for your mutant giraffe legs, Kirschtein.”

“Hn. Hold that thought,” Marco said, cutting them off before the snark could begin in earnest.  “Lemme try something.” He nudged Eren a little further up onto his knees, and pushed his thighs a little closer together, licking his free hand and slicking up his dick as he did.

It took a couple false starts, even once Eren figured out what he was going for and pushed Jean into sitting up more. But the two of them found their rhythm again, fucking Jean’s hand…and Marco pressed a warm kiss to the corner of Eren’s eyes and slid his dick between his thighs, teasing across the sensitive skin where they met his body.  

“ _Mmmm…n-nice…”_ he murmured, hitching back into Marco’s movements.  It’s not quite the real thing, but the slick head of Marco’s cock teased the underside of his balls with warm, pleasant friction, and Marco’s arms wound tight around Eren’s waist and roamed over his muscled chest again, slow and heavy and almost worshipfull.  All three of them were gasping for it, Eren’s fingers in Jean’s hair trembling and tugging and Marco buried his forehead in the crook of his shoulder and  _moved,_ hips rocking hard against Eren’s ass, getting harder and harder to keep the rhythm.

“’m close…baby I’m close…” Jean whimpered, tilting his head against the pull of Eren’s hand in his hair, trying to catch his lips.

“Me…m-me too, c’mon…” Eren curled his fingers around Jean’s again, adding to the pressure.  Jean added a twist to his wrist, pressing the heads together and sliding his thumb through Eren’s slit…and that was all it took to tip him over the edge, stars popping behind his eyes. It’d been so  _long,_ so long with nothing but their voices guiding his imagination…in the familiar warmth of his life-long home, the two boys he loved so dearly holding him tight between him and gasping for him…Eren let his head fall back against Marco’s shoulder, a wide, blissful smile curling his lips as he shook between them.  Marco cursed in his ear, sinking his teeth into his shoulder.  Eren tipped his head to the side, mouthing up his jaw, stubble scraping against his lips. He pushed his hips back into Marco’s movements, urging him on with gasping whispers as the aftershocks shook through his body.  Jean reached between Eren’s legs with his come-slick hand and curled his fingers around the head of Marco’s cock, making him hiss and buck forward into Eren’s back. Eren squeezed tight at Jean’s shoulders, leaning forward for his hard, eager kisses as Jean managed to finish them both together, his come and Marco’s mixing on Eren’s dark, sweaty skin as Jean whimpered into his mouth.

Eren let out a long, shuddering breath and let himself sag onto Jean’s chest, just for this minute not caring about the mess.  Jean hugged him tight, kissing his cheeks, and then rolled him gently to the side to make room for Marco to flop over with them, so that Eren and Marco wound up more or less nose-to-nose (and more or less on top of Jean.)  Marco cupped his face and gave him a long, grateful kiss. 

“How long can I convince you to cuddle before you sprint for the shower?” Jean muttered in his ear.

“Ulgh. Sorry.”  Eren tilted his head to kiss him, but disentangled himself and sat up nevertheless.  “I haven’t even showered off the Greyhound grime yet.  You can always  _join_ me…”

Jean sighed as Marco (the least sticky of them) swung his legs off the couch and reached for a nearby box of Kleenex.  “I’ll help Marco make breakfast.  Our water bill can’t take too many more communal showers…”  Eren winced.  Reality strikes again.

He kept his shower short, especially once the smell of cooking waffles wafted its way in from the kitchen.  He exited the shower to a bathroom stripped of towels and Marco waiting outside the door to tackle him with a blanket the second it opens, while Jean yelled at them both to stop dripping everywhere and come get some damn food before he feeds it to the goats, and yeah, he was  _definitely_ home.

“’Ey, what’s this?” Jean asked when Eren wandered into the kitchen, extricated from Marco and lazily drying his hair. He was poking curiously at the glass cake pan Eren had left on the counter the night before, and licking waffle batter off the spoon in his free hand.

“Oh.” Eren smiled bashfully, draping the towel around his shoulders as he went to get down plates. “Mina cookies.”

“Those mint chip ones?” Jean dropped his spoon in the sink, eyes lighting up. “The ones you never shut up about?”

“The very same.”

“Mind if I eat one?” Jean already had two cookies in his hand.

“Go nuts, baby,” Eren chuckled. “She made ‘em for you guys.”

“Shoulda brought  _her_ home,” Jean mumbled, over the crinkling of waxed paper. Eren laughed.

“God, poor girl caught enough of the Skype sex through the walls without having to put up with—“

“There’s somethin’ else in here. Envelope?”

“Yeah, she said she’d give me the recipe—oh. Huh.” Eren broke off as he turned, and Jean held out the pan to him. There  _was_ an envelope in the pan but…it was a thick, padded mailing envelope, not the kind you’d stick a recipe in. It took up almost the entire pan, hidden in the bottom under a single layer of waxed paper and cookies. Another gift from Mina? He tugged it out, smile fading into confusion. It didn’t weigh much, but the sides bulged, stuffed full with something soft and light…

Marco came running at the sound of smashing glass from the kitchen. He skidded to a halt in the doorway and sucked in a breath at the scene.

Jean and Eren stood frozen in the middle of the room, surrounded by thick white shards of baking glass and hardly any cookies…just enough to hide the envelope from a curious glance. Jean was still frozen, his eyes fixed on Eren’s face alight with worry. Blood dripped down his ankle from a shallow nick where a shard of glass had caught him.

“Eren? Baby, what’s wrong?” Marco stared at his white-faced boyfriend, from the ripped envelope in one hand and the soft thing draped over the other. “What is that?”

“It used to be mine,” Eren whispered. “I gave it away, a long time ago. It used to be mine.”

Jean bent down, moving his bare feet carefully around the broken glass, and picked up a bright spot of gold among the long white spars. It was a key, a corroded-looking skeleton key made of dull brass, nearly the length of Jean’s palm. It had a leather cord knotted through the scrollwork on the end, long enough to be a necklace.

“The  _hell?”_ Jean whispered, casting Marco a helpless look.

Eren stayed where he was, white faced and frozen still as a statue where he’d dropped the pan. He held a note in one hand. In the other was an old and faded red scarf, draped across his palm.

The note was just a few words, in the handwriting he recognized as belonging to the woman he had, up until a few moments ago, known as Mina.

_I thought it was time I gave this back to you._

 


	8. One Rare Gem to Another

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barely reunited and still reeling from their ordeal at Oberlin College, Eren, Jean, and Marco follow the trail of a scarf and a key back to the basement of a church in Canada...and back to the bloody night sixteen years ago when the reservation town of Shingashina nearly burned to the ground, and a young ex-cop fled the country with a little green-eyed boy. 
> 
> A lot of things went wrong in Shingashina. That’s how it all began, after all.

_Eren was on the couch when Marco found him, poking idly at his laptop as he failed to concentrate on the research he was supposed to be doing._

_“Hey, Eren? Can we talk?”_

_“Hn? Sure?” Eren looked up, and took in Marco’s nervous eyes and fidgeting fingers. He closed his laptop. “Oh._ Talk _talk, huh?”_

_“N-not in a bad way,” Marco mumbled. Eren set his laptop on the floor and scooted over to the arm of the couch, making room for Marco to sit. It was a few months past the night Eren had come across him in the kitchen, crying over a grease-stained takeout menu. “Look, a couple days ago I overheard Levi say something about your hometown…Shingashina?”_

_Eren just listened, tilting his head and trying to look non-threatening. Marco looked like he needed a hug, but he also looked like what he had to say was a little too serious for snuggles just yet._

_“Yeah?”_

_“Well…uh…” Marco rubbed the back of his neck. “I wasn’t trying to snoop or anything, I was just curious… I don’t know anythin’ about Canada, I just wanted to see where you grew up, so I googled it, and…”_

_“Ah.” Eren winced, enlightenment dawning. “Lemme guess. Twenty page of race riots and car bombs.”_

_Marco nodded, looking miserable._

_“’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I didn’t—“_

_“Hey…Marco, it’s_ okay.” _Marco’s hands trembled in his lap, and Eren was at a loss._ What would Jean do right now… _he reached over and caught Marco’s hands, twining their fingers together. “It’s no big secret…that shit was pretty big news when it went down.”_

_Marco looked up, hesitantly, and met his eyes. “You were there, weren’t you,” he said softly. “1999…you would have been, what, five? Right around the time you and Levi moved?”_

_Eren shut his eyes with a shaky sigh. “Yeah. I was there. Last night I spent in Shingashina…fuckin’ shithole that it is.” He shook his head. “Every time someone starts in about Canadians being too nice I just_ laugh…”

_“I-is that how…” Marco’s voice trailed off, but he freed a hand and ran his thumb over one of the old, faded scars across Eren’s upper arm. “I read about the car bomb, the one that went off outside the church…some kind of…what, white supremacists?”_

_“That’s a word for it.” Eren squeezed Marco’s fingers. “Motherfuckin’ Titans of Man. That said, they never did prove_ who _set the big bomb. Smart money is the Titans wanted something to pin on the natives...a bunch of alcoholic Indian savages, bombing a Christian church…good symbol.”_

_“S-so you were near the church?” Marco asked softly._

_“I was_ in _the church. My dad - my_ birth _dad, he was a sort of underground pediatrician, he operated out of the basement. I was standin’ under a stained glass window when the car blew outside, and the whole thing came down on my head.”_

_“E-eren…” Marco’s eyes were swimming with tears, and Eren sighed and wrapped an arm around his shoulders, pulling him close._

_“It’s o_ kay, _seriously, gorgeous. It was a long time ago. ‘s not like it was a big secret either. I’da told you about the scars any time you asked.” He scooted around enough to brace both hands on Marco’s shoulder, stroking one thumb along the curve of his neck. “I’ve had a lot of time to heal.”_

 _Marco shivered and sagged forward, pulling his feet up and curling into Eren’s side. “’s not how I wanted to find out,” he mumbled, resting his head on Eren’s shoulder. “B-but…I felt like you should know that_ I _knew…”_

 _“Thanks, sweetheart,” Eren said, sincerely. “I’m glad you told me. I’m glad you_ know, _too.”_

_“Me too,” Marco sighed. “So that’s how you lost your hearing…and the…y’know…”_

_“The whole wonky pain response thing? Yeah. Well, that’s the_ general _cause. Head trauma, and the pressure from the shock wave._ Specific _cause is an acute case of ‘fuck if we know.’”_

_Marco cocked his head, smiling in spite of himself._

_“Only recorded cases of indifference to pain other ‘n me are genetic,” Eren clarified. “Born with it, y’know? But something whacked me on the head real hard and apparently my brain was like ‘fuck it, don’t care anymore.’” He grinned, looking proud of himself. “There’s textbook chapters about me. Erwin’s doctor buddy Hanji thinks I’m the best thing that ever happened to their career.”_

_Marco laughed softly and pressed a kiss to the deep scar that traced the line of Eren’s throat. Eren huffed at him – he wasn’t self-conscious about his scars, but neither did he like attention being lavished on him._ Too many creepy ‘sensitive’ chicks in college, _he claimed._

 _“Hey, it’s_ topical _scar-kissing,” Marco protested, and Eren rolled his eyes. “I’m…I’m glad I know…” he said, more seriously, and Eren nuzzled his nose into his hair. “Sorry for making you retell it all…”_

_“It’s fine, I promise,” Eren sighed. “I don’t really remember much before I got outside.”_

_“How’d you get out? I mean…” Marco flushed. “I saw the pictures, that place looked destroyed.”_

_Eren stared off into the distance for a long moment, smiling softly. “Some rooky cop. Wasn’t even old enough to shave yet, not that I could tell at that age. Little scrawny trainee with a flak vest that didn’t fit right…he got the door open, from the outside. I…I just remember feeling the breeze, the wind on my face, y’know? Couldn’t hear, couldn’t see much of anything, but it was all burning and the breeze felt cool, so I went towards it…he opened the door and I ran straight into his arms.”_

_“Where’s he now?” Marco asked, watching the way Eren cast his eyes down in thought._

_“_ Now? _Haven’t got a clue.” Eren glanced up at Marco sidelong, and smirked. “But an hour ago he was re-scrubbing the shower with that bandanna of his tied over his nose.”_  

* * *

 

“This stinks,” Levi muttered to the tinted glass of the passenger-side window. “It stinks high to heaven.” Erwin didn’t reply, calmly focused on dodging rush-hour traffic on I-35. “First Trost, and now we’re all the way back to _fucking_ Shingashina. Sixteen years they’ve been silent, and now all of this…” he tugged at the folds of the white scarf around his neck, staring out the window at the hulking silhouettes of the wind turbines dotting the cornfield.

Erwin didn’t take his eyes off the road. “I’ve already spoken to Hanji. They are conducting…background checks.” Levi just snorted.

At Erwin’s typical driving speed, it wasn’t long until the bulk of the farmhouse loomed on the gray horizon. It was a blocky old dinosaur of a building, squatting in its patch of trees like a mossy brownstone toad. It was ancient and drafty and pretty ugly in most lights, and the boys inhabited it like three snails in an overlarge, mouse-ridden shell.

It had some charm to it now, at least, after nearly twenty years of being a _home,_ not just moldering, cracking hay storage. The boys and their friends and the cats and the goats and yeah, okay, Levi himself had managed to stamp some personality across the stone walls and high ceilings over the years. When he’d first seen it—

God, when he’d first seen it the place had been a _wreck,_ cracked and cold with sagging roofs and mold streaked down the bare stone walls. To this day, a whiff of mold or mildew would make his stomach kick, an echo of the icy weight in the pit of his stomach when he climbed out of a hastily rented car and looked at the place that he was supposed to make a home for a _child._ A child covered with a network of raw shrapnel wounds that clung to his tiny body like cobwebs.

 _Shingashina,_ Levi thought, watching lights flick on as they turned into the snaking driveway. _We have to go back to Shingashina._ He’d crossed the Canadian border sixteen years ago in the dead of night, slipping through a sleepy rural border crossing with his silent little green-eyed shadow hidden under a tarp on the floor of the back seat, and he hadn’t returned since. Maybe there was something there, something pushing them to take the leads they’d chased that lead them east and south, Dublin Detroit Paris Sydney, Busan South Korea and Trost, New Zealand,anything that meant staying _away._ It was inevitable, wasn’t it, that when the Coat of Arms came crawling back out of the past, everything that mattered pointed them straight back to the rubble of a bombed out church in Shingashina. Coat of Arms was a disease, and like all diseases it attacked the weak and the sick, it festered in broken skin and open wounds, and what was Shingashina but an open wound...the spot where all humanity’s ugly hate and greed and bilious prejudice had boiled up and burst open and ripped apart the skin.

_Sixteen years it’s all been quiet...and now the wounds we couldn’t find will start to rot._

Erwin flicked a quick, sidelong glance in his direction. “We’re better prepared this time,” he said, very softly. “We won’t be caught blind again.” He made a sharp turn off the interstate, tires skidding on rutted asphalt barely a step up from a gravel road. He cast another quick look at Levi, and a faint smile curved his lips. “We found the Shingashina kids in the end, didn’t we?”

Levi just turned his head to stare out the window again. “Two of ‘em.”

Erwin’s jaw clenched. “ _Two of them,”_ he echoed, and the tires grated a little louder on the ragged road. 

 

Jean was waiting for them out on the splintery front porch by the time they pulled up to the farmhouse. It was a holdover from the time when his kids were little, and they’d run out onto the porch to meet the headlights winding down the long gravel drive. There was something odd about seeing him standing there alone.

Marco slipped out as they got out of the car, but he hovered near the door, shifting his weight awkwardly as his eyes flicked from person to person.

“Eren?” Levi asked, and Jean jerked his head towards the back of the house.

“Roof.”

“How’s he doing?”

“Not a fuckin’ clue,” Jean muttered, avoiding Levi’s eyes. “Haven’t seen him sit up there this long since his cat died.”

Marco moved at that, wrapping his arm tight around Jean’s hunched shoulders. Jean shut his eyes and leaned into him, his free hand reaching around Marco’s waist to pull him closer. He clutched at something in his other hand: a long tarnished brass key. Marco covered Jean’s hand with his own, easing his grip where the rough brass head cut into the flesh of his palm.

Levi squeezed Jean’s shoulder, hoping he was being comforting. He was aware as he did so of Marco staring past him, shadowed eyes locked on Erwin. There was a silent communication there that he and Jean weren’t privy to. It wasn’t an uncommon experience, when you spent a lot of time with Erwin Smith.

Levi glanced over his shoulder at Erwin, who nodded towards the back of the house. _Go to Eren._ Levi nodded in reply, not bothering to hide his gratitude.

Only the kitchen lights were on, illuminating a couple barely touched mugs on the wobbly table. Levi threaded his way through the dark house on autopilot, through the long back hall and up the ladder to the attic.

Eren was a tiny dark bundle against the fading sunset, sitting close to the roof edge (a little too close for Levi’s comfort) with his knees drawn up to his chest. Something about his familiar silhouette was _off,_ but Levi couldn’t place it until he’d scrambled through the open window. He was wearing a scarf despite the warm evening, draped around his neck.

Levi padded across the shifting shingles and settled himself next to his son, letting his legs dangle over the guttered edge. Eren didn’t speak, but he curled in on himself a little more, tugging the frayed edge of the scarf up over his nose. Levi just leaned back on his hands and waited in silence, watching as the sun sank lower and the color leached out of the clouds.

A few more lights flicked on downstairs, spilling spindly bars of gold out over the dark grass. Noises filtered up through the attic, voices and footsteps and glasses clinking, and the soft rustling background nearly swallowed Eren’s whisper.

“I didn’t recognize her.”

Levi tipped his head to the side, watching his face in the rapidly fading light.

“You’re sure it was her?”

Eren opened the hand fisted in his lap, and passed Levi a crumpled scrap of paper.

_I thought it was time I gave this back to you._

_“_ My mom knitted this scarf for me,” Eren said, still in that barely there little whisper. “For Christmas, when I was five.” He paused for a long moment poking his fingers in and out of the loose weave. “Must’ve taken weeks, keeping it secret from me...but I gave it away...it was so _cold_ in the church and she couldn’t stop shivering...” He finally looked at Levi, letting the scarf slip down off his nose. “It’s what my mom would’ve done...”

And Levi was enough of a father to recognize the voice of a child who didn’t know if he’d done the right thing. He looped an arm around him, and Eren instantly curled into his side.

“All those years wondering where she was,” Eren said. “And when she was right in front of me I didn’t even know it.” He snuggled closer, and laid his head on Levi’s shoulder. “She grew up beautiful, Dad. You wouldn’t believe how beautiful.”

“Course I would. She’s an Ackermann.”

Eren snorted, and Levi ruffled his hair.

The sat in silence for awhile, until Eren sighed heavily, staring up at the emerging stars. “We failed, her, didn’t we...” he whispered, trailing his fingers over the scars up the outside of his arm.

“You were six,” Levi said flatly. “You did exactly what you were supposed to do. You were in a burning building, and you ran outside. _We_ failed her, Erwin and me. Failed Mikasa, and Armin, Petra and Auro, and yo--”

“ _Not_ me,” Eren cut him off, the fire finally back in his voice. “Never, _ever_ me.” He wrapped his arms tight around Levi’s neck and buried his face in his jacket.

Levi rested his cheek on the top of Eren’s head and bit his tongue against the truth, and let Eren hug him with all the love his coward heart didn’t deserve.

They stayed there in silence for a long time, until the sun set for good and the streetlights lit up the highway, sodium bulbs tiny and twinkling as Christmas lights across the distance. The after-dusk quiet settled in heavy with the true darkness, until Levi half-imagined he could hear the distant, monstrous _woosh_ of the nearest wind turbine churning the air, nothing but a moving patch of starless sky now that the sun was gone.

The roar of an engine and the shriek of brakes broke the stillness eventually, and heralded the arrival of the last person they’d been waiting for.

“...that’ll be Armin,” Eren sighed, over the sound of spraying gravel.

“Don’t hold it against him, he learned to drive in Dublin,” Levi aid mildly, following him through the window.

 

Eren hadn’t made it off the stairs before Armin accosted him, his normal composure as shot as the brakes on his car.

“It was _her?”_ he blurted, his fingers digging into Eren’s shoulders. “You’re sure, you’re _really_ sure it was--”

Eren just grunted, shouldering past him into the kitchen. He was already getting sick of those questions. Armin followed, scraping shaky fingers through his bangs. Eren avoided his boyfriends’ worried eyes and skirted the table entirely, perching on the edge of the kitchen counter and pulling his knees up against his chest again. Jean was sitting backwards on one of the kitchen chairs, resting his head on the back, and Armin returned to his spot sitting on the table. Marco reflected, not for the first time, that this family had a serious aversion to chairs as they were meant to be used.

“Eren, Ere-- _Jesus.”_ Armin cut himself off with a harsh gasp, his eyes locked on the tattered scarf around Eren’s neck. “Is that...you used to wear that all the time, when we were kids...what...”

Eren pressed his fingers into his temples, trying to hold back the headache as eyes bored into him from all directions. “I gave it to her,” he mumbled, digging his fingers through the loose threads. “When we were hiding in the church.”

“ _We,”_ Jean said, very softly. It wasn’t a question...it wasn’t even directed at Eren, just Jean repeating the word to himself, leaving it echoing in the air. Eren didn’t dare look at him.

“Never said I was the only person _in_ there that night,” he whispered, tugging the edge of the scarf up over his nose. “I was just the only one who got out.”

Hurt flashed in Jean’s eyes, raw and bone deep and quickly buried. “I know,” Eren said, his voice small and rough and muffled in the fabric over his mouth. “I never told you about her...what was the point? She was just this kid from a few houses down, my dad gave her medicine when she got whooping cough, and when people started setting cars on fire and my mom pushed me outside and told me to run to the church I smacked right into her. I spent most of my life thinking she was dead, and then maybe she wasn’t dead, just disappeared, just...just _out_ there, somewhere, _taken_ what was the point of talking about it? What was the _fucking_ point--”

“Eren. Don’t.”

Eren started: he hadn’t seen Marco move from his spot by the door, but he was right at his side now, wrapping his warm palms gently over Eren’s fists, easing his clenched fingers into relaxing. Eren let out a shaky breath, suddenly aware of muscles pulled too tight all through his body, and Marco laced their fingers together as he let his hands uncurl. “Don’t,” he said again, resting his forehead against Eren’s for a second. He shot a quick, sharp glance in Jean’s direction, half worried and half warning. _This is bigger than you._ Jean met his eyes for a bare second before he looked away, his hand curled white-knuckle tight around his right shoulder.

Marco cast his eyes to Levi and Erwin, looking for help, and got nothing. Erwin seemed to have detached himself entirely from his surroundings, eyes fixed on a corner of the kitchen as though he could stare through it into the cornfields beyond.

“ _Taken,”_ Marco echoed, trying not to look as lost as he felt. “Mina was kidnapped during the riots in Shingashina?”

“Her name’s not Mina.” Armin replied in place of the silent older men. “If she is who we think she is...her name’s Mikasa.” He hesitated for a moment, eyes flicking to Levi, and then added, “Ackerman.”

Marco’s eyes snapped to Levi, and he was surprised to see that Jean’s did too. Jean had released his death grip on his own shoulder, in favor of playing with the big brass key.

“Yeah. She is,” Levi said with a heavy sigh, answering the question no one had managed to voice just yet. “Her mother and mine were...some kind of cousin, or aunt...half-aunt...something.” He dug his hands deep into his pockets. “Never really knew either of them.”

“What about the mark?” Erwin asked Eren, speaking for the first time. “Did she keep her shoulders covered?”

Eren shook his head. “She made a point of _not_ covering them. Racerbacks, seven days a week, nothing--”

“Tattoo concealer and powder,” Armin said flatly. “It takes five minutes.” He caught Marco’s quizzical look and shrugged, unbuttoning his cardigan and slipping it off one shoulder. “Do it every time I go to the gym.”

Marco blinked. There was a faint mark on Armin’s shoulder, picked out in irregular, blobby pinkish lines almost like a birthmark. A rough, five-sided shape like a shield, with an X through the center. A primitive sword and shield coat of arms, just like Jean’s.

“They have to make ‘em look natural, so the buyers don’t realize their kids have been branded. But that makes them easy to hide.”

Marco just stared for a long, long time. Then he disentangled his fingers from Eren’s and reached around his boyfriend for the carafe of tar-like coffee still bubbling away on the Keurig. He picked a mug out of the sink, considered it, replaced it, and took the entire six cup carafe and sat at the table.

“Somebody” he said, and took a drink from the pot. “Please. Start at the goddamned beginning.”

 

* * *

 

Marco sat folded in on himself in the front seat of a tiny, deep green hybrid car, absorbed in the iPad propped on his lap.

_Adopting a child from overseas: the favorite symbol of philanthropy in America, beyond a certain minimum pay grade. A family in the making, tormented by infertility sparing in no effort, no expense, to bring a better life to a child abandoned by fate and circumstance...assuming said child is healthy, abled, displaying all signs of conventional attractiveness, and as young as possible._

_Are there children in need of adoption, around the world? Of course there are. But perhaps not as many as we would like to believe, and certainly not in the demographics that hopeful parents with deep pockets desire._

_But where there’s desire, there is demand, and where there is demand, there is a niche for suppliers. And thus do the wheels of capitalism grind inevitably into action. If they wish for healthy, attractive, morally fulfilling children under the age of five, then children under the age of five there shall be. If they wish for a girl with red hair and green eyes, demonstrating a talent for playing the piano with a basic education in Mandarin and Japanese?_

_Where there’s demand, there will be supply._

_“_ Interesting read?” Armin asked, flicking on his blinker to follow the car ahead of them down an off-ramp onto a two-lane state highway. They’d been dispatched into Rochester for food, along with Armin’s promise to get Marco up to speed during the drive.

Marco didn’t look up from the screen. “I can already tell you wrote it, if that’s what you’re getting at.” Armin grinned wolfishly at the wet gray road ahead of them, in a way that Marco had come to recognize. _Game on. Round one: point Marco._

He’d first met Armin...close to a year ago, now that he thought of it, not long before Wonton Day. And _met_ was a fairly grand description for what had actually happened, which was a sleepy, still-shirtless Marco sitting on Armin while he was passed out on the couch. Some yelling and a few rounds of awkward introductions later, he’d learned that this was Eren and Jean’s old friend the high powered prosecutor (and yes, he _was_ a year younger than either of them) and that they were so used to finding him crash landed in a jet lagged heap on their couch that it’d never crossed their minds to warn the new outsider.

And it was not long after that that Marco had first become aware of The Game. It was a constant underpinning of life in this weird little stray-cat family, a mostly benign consequence of who they were and the life they lived. It started with the relationships, and grew from there. He’d realized, in the early days, that Eren and Jean were both Levi’s kids, his boys _,_ but Eren was _his_ kid, his _son_ in a way that Jean wasn’t....and Marco was something to him too, another of his rescued children even without the history behind him. Erwin was Levi’s husband, but he wasn’t a _father_ to the boys, more like half family half employer...

And that was where The Game began. Things Erwin knew that Levi didn’t, that Levi knew and held back from the boys, that the boys knew and held back from Levi, or that made their way to Jean’s ears by way of Armin’s casually-dropped hints. An endless web of half-deliberate, half-incidental never-quite-lies, just...information withheld and suggestions left hanging.

Jean and Armin were the central players of the younger generation - they batted riddles and observations and suspicions back and forth like two kittens with a ball of string, between Armin’s talent for scheming and Jean’s often-underestimated powers of observation. It was Erwin’s game, at it came as naturally to Armin as breathing. Levi knew how it was played, but he...didn’t, not unless Erwin’s plans forced his hand, as they had at Oberlin. Marco saw the exhaustion in his eyes, every time Erwin and Armin and Jean went into high gear. This game was Erwin’s, but it wasn’t Levi’s first.

And then, there was Eren.

Eren didn’t play the game.

It wasn’t that he lacked the skills -- Eren’s intellect was easy, _dangerously_ easy to underestimate. He wasn’t naive, and he wasn’t gullible, but his empathy, endless, _boundless_ empathy, split the waves and ripples of The Game around him like a staff striking the floor of the Red Sea. He was the calm spot, the anchor that tied them all together.

These were the times that Marco wondered what would happen when he finally faltered, and the separated sea came crashing back down over all their heads.

 

He stared out the window for awhile, scrolling idly up and down the report with a fingertip. After that creepy introduction, the report was mostly statistics, still shot through with Armin’s sarcastic flair for the dramatic. Common knowledge vastly overestimated the number of children in need of adoption overseas, the image of little angels packed in orphanages awaiting rescue was mostly a feel good fantasy. A disturbing number of kids adopted by American and European families were bought and paid for, and in the worst cases simply _stolen_ from their parents.

The damp bulk of the courthouse slid by outside, refracted and distorted in a hundred raindrops clinging to the glass, stretching and bending the bars set in the lowest windows. Marco shivered and dropped his gaze back to the bright screen in his lap. Armin’s little hybrid barely made any engine noise to break the stillness, and the silence inside the car was starting to get uncomfortable. Marco suspected that was by design; Armin wanted to draw him out, get him talking first so he could assess what Marco understood.

“So, Coat of Arms is...” Marco paused, and tapped his finger against the iPad screen as he thought. “Coat of arms is the supplier.”

“Right in one.” _Point: Marco. **“**_ Coat of arms, your family colors, carrying on the line, get it get it? Tell ‘em what you want in your little angel and they’ll supply said little angel. Whatever they have to do to get it. Erwin’s been tailing the bastards for years.”

“Tailing them for years, and _Erwin_ hasn’t caught up yet?”

Armin smirked faintly, shooting Marco a sidelong glance. “You’ve got a suspicious little mind there, Bodt.”

 _Takes one to know one?_ Marco considered, and decided not to say it aloud. That kind of insult was ever so slightly out of step with the nature of The Game. And besides, he liked Armin.

“’N you’re not wrong, anyway.” The little hybrid bumped over the seams of Asien Star’s weathered parking lot, and Armin pulled up under the spray-paint sign and killed the engine. “They’re damn good at what they do. They’ve got a hell of a system, we’ve never been able to touch it. We know they take orders, but no one’s got a clue _how_ they do it - we never find out they’ve been active somewhere ‘til it’s already all gone down. Only ever gotten close to ‘em twice.”

 _Twice,_ Marco thought. “Once in Shingashina, and once in Detroit.” Armin nodded. “How many kids has he found?”

He got another one of those sideways lawyer-looks, a habit Erwin and Armin (and Levi, though he’d hate to admit it) shared. “How many do you think?”

Marco bit his lip. _Round two._

“You. Jean. Min--Mikasa. Sort of.” Armin was still waiting, what had he missed? What were the common threads...young, healthy, attractive, _talented--_ oh. “ _Marlowe._ Marlowe Song.”

Armin grinned and flicked his finger through the air, chalking up an imaginary point.Then he fished his wallet out of the center console and disappeared through the doors of the restaurant, leaving Marco briefly alone with his thoughts.

 _The supplier, taking orders. A pretty little girl with beautiful black hair. An Asian boy with amber eyes and a gift for music and languages. Or..._ his eyes flicked towards the doors as they swung shut behind Armin, gaudy Chinese New Year streamers bouncing against the frosted glass. _Or an angelic little boy with blond hair and big blue eyes, and all the early signs of genius._

The house felt calmer when they returned, the truly ridiculous amount of greasy Chinese food in two paper bags attracting even the shyest of the outdoor cats out from under the porch. Erwin and Levi were still in the kitchen, their heads together over something on the table.

Marco was faintly relieved to find Eren and Jean curled up on the couch in the living room, in a ball of complicated silence. Both their eyes were dark and distant, fixed on two different pasts, but at least they were together, Jean’s head nestled on Eren’s shoulder. Marco couldn’t decide who needed to be sandwiched more, so he just knelt on the floor between their tangled legs and reached up to wrap his arms around both their shoulders. It came as a faint surprise when they instantly scooted apart and hauled him up onto the couch, smushing him into the middle spot usually reserved for whoever was most in need of reassurance.

Marco sighed and shut his eyes as their hands found his, letting all the complicated layers of the game drain from his mind as he breathed in their warmth. Jean cuddled into his lap, nose nudging against Marco’s collarbone, and Eren leaned heavily against his shoulder.

Marco glanced at the clock on the wall...a little after eight pm. Not twelve hours ago they’d all been tangled together on this same damn couch, giddily celebrating Eren’s homecoming. Half a turn of the earth to take them from finally feeling whole again back to the empty old familiarity of everything falling a part.

“’m sorry,” Eren said softly, staring down at his and Marco’s fingers intertwined on the cushion. “I’m sorry it happened this way...” the big brass key lay on the coffee table, glinting dully. Jean sat up to look at him, his shadowed eyes the same color as the key in the dim lighting. Eren avoided his gaze again. “I know you’re hurt, I know...I just...I didn’t...” he looked up at Jean. “Isn’t there anything you’ve kept back from _me?”_

“No,” Jean said, his voice nothing but quiet and honest. “There isn’t.” Eren’s eyes filled with tears.

“Stop it,” Marco said. “Both of you. Don’t do this...least of all now.” There was a note of pleading he couldn’t keep out of his voice. He’d come to believe there wasn’t a force on earth that could shake Jean and Eren’s love for each other, and the thought that such a thing existed frightened him to a depth he was afraid to plumb.

Jean and Eren both looked up at him, halted in their tracks. “I’m sorry,” Eren said again, and Jean reached across Marco with a huff and caught his other hand. Eren shivered when he raised it to his lips and pressed a kiss against their twined fingers.

“I wish you’d never brought that think home with you,” he mumbled.

“I don’t even know what it _is,”_ Eren said helplessly.

“I do.” Armin collapsed into the chair in the corner, somehow not spilling a heaping bowl of food in the process, and jabbed a splintery takeout chopstick at the key on the table. “’S the key to the basement of the church. Grisha Jaeger’s basement.”

Marco let his head thump back against the couch. “I thought you were getting me _caught up,”_ he moaned at the ceiling, before he realized that Eren and Jean looked as baffled as he did.”

"Never saw it..." Eren mumbled, rubbing his temples as he strained his memory. "Don't think it ever occurred to me that you  _could_ lock the basement."

“Yeh. Well,” Armin said, around a mouthful of orange chicken. “You were always the picture o’ health when we were tiny, weren’t you? _I_ was down there gettin’ looked at by the doc every other week. Funny thing,” he mused, to all outward appearances still absorbed in his bowl. “Lotsa other kids down there, sniffles and scrapes and bruises, but I don’t think I ever saw the same kid twice.”

 _Round three,_ Marco thought.

Eren picked up the key, turning it over and over between his fingers, eyes shut tight. “He gave it to me. When the fires started...he pushed me outside and told me to run to the church...and he put this in my hand. I’d forgotten...I must have lost it in the church, when the window came down...”

“And Mikasa picked it up,” Armin finished for him.

“Well, we knew _something_ was going wrong for them in Shingashina,” Erwin said from the doorway. “Looks like most of what was going wrong was Grisha Jaeger.”

The three boys looked at each other.

“I need wontons. Like, all the wontons,” Jean said, eventually.

“Agreed.”

 

“So how’d you know things were going wrong in Shingashina?” Jean asked, as though he was asking Erwin how his day had been. He’d reverted to sitting on the floor, using Eren’s legs as a backrest, and an infusion of greasy appetizers seemed to have him feeling more like his usual sardonic self.

“You’re lookin’ at him,” Erwin said, jerking his head at Armin, who gave Jean a bright smile.

“I’m just _full_ of surprises.”

“ _Normally,_ Coat of Arms is meticulous as a little heap of termites,” Erwin elaborated. “Never outright snatch a kid anyone’s gonna come looking for...they like civil unrest and natural disasters--”

“--and Dublin in the nineties was _both,_ believe you me--” Armin interjected.

“--right, but just this once, they grabbed a little boy who’d lost his parents, without bothering to look into grandparents.” He smiled faintly. “Abel Artlet’s an old friend of the family. Took me six years, but I finally tracked the kid down in Shingashina.”

“What the hell were people with that kinda money doing in _Shingashina?”_ Eren demanded. “Your parents weren’t rich.”

“They were on the payroll,” Armin said. “Temps.” He darted a quick, nervous glance at Jean. “Tutors, that kind of thing. Turns out some buyers don’t want their little angel with stunted growth and asthma and an an allergy to the whole of Mother Nature, so. Returned to sender.” He smiled again, but this time there was something shatterglass brittle behind the brightness.

“As near as we could ever figure,” Levi said softly, “it was a hub town. Distribution center. They’d hide kids there, or shuffle them through on their way to somewhere else. It was a logical place to stick a pediatrician on the payroll.”

“So you were there looking for Armin,” Marco said, slowly. Once again, an image was beginning to form in his mind. “And then the riots started, and...”

“Two kids went missing. Eren Jaeger and Mikasa Ackermann.”

“And they like civil unrest.”

“Bingo.” _Point Marco._ “Found Eren in the hospital after a week of looking.” He smiled at Eren, quick but genuine. “Fortunately, there aren’t too many Sioux kids in a town that size with bright green eyes.”

“And Mikasa...”

Erwin dropped his eyes, sighing the sigh of a man who didn’t like to be beaten. “Sixteen years, and we never found her.” He looked to the key in Eren’s hands. “She sure as hell found _us,_ though.”

Eren huffed a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “She didn’t come to South Dakota for the lip reading class, did she? She came for the lip reading _teacher.”_

“We got an email from Hanji about an hour ago,” Levi said grimly. “Mina Carolina’s service record seems to have popped into existence about a month before she did. Just enough to get her signed up for the in-service without anyone bothering to look twice. She wanted _you_ to have that key, and she didn’t want anyone else to see you get it.”

“Why Eren, though?” Armin frowned. “You didn’t really know her, you said it yourself. She was just another girl in town...I was _close_ to her--”

Jean cut him off with a snort. “She was trying to hide her moves. You’re a _prosecutor._ The last barista to serve you at Starbucks could end up in a conduct hearing. Who the hell cares who a sign language teacher talks to?”

Armin huffed, biting his lip, a trace of that brittleness back in his expression. He suddenly looked very young to Marco’s eyes.

But that wasn’t what was niggling away at the back of his mind...Jean had said something important, without realizing it.

“She was trying to _hide her moves,”_ he said. “Didn’t want anyone to know she had the key, or that she’d given it to Eren...she’s being watched. Or acting like she is. Someone’s tailing her. The hell is so important about the basement of that church?”

“The hell is so important about that _key?”_ Levi said, tipping his chair back on two legs. “Thing’s fucking massive. Forget a hairpin, you could open the lock that thing goes to with a _chopstick.”_

The heavy silence that followed was broken, suddenly and unceremoniously, by two sounds: a squeaky, metallic little noise like _plink,_ and Eren’s grunt of surprise.

The big brass key had come apart in his hands as he fiddled with it. The ornate top unscrewed from the shaft like a bottle cap, and the main shaft of the key was just a hollow tube. And attached to the scrollwork top was _another_ key, tiny enough to hide inside the shaft of the big one. It was steel, tiny and intricate and high-security, like the key to a safe or a deposit box.

Levi burst out laughing, the first real, _genuine_ laugh anyone had heard that night, and let his chair thump back to the floor. “Well, that answers that question.”

Eren sighed, looking up to meet his adoptive father’s eyes. “There’s no way around it, is there?” He asked softly. “We’re going back to Shingashina.”

* * *

 

“Believe me when I tell you that this is something I truly, _truly_ never thought I’d say,” Jean said, standing next to Eren’s ancient car with his hands on his hips, “but this place is worse than Detroit.”

“I’m honored,” Eren muttered, his eyes scrunched up against the wind, staring out across the street.

They were parked outside a cinderblock convenience store with bars on the windows, one of the few operating businesses in the miserable crossroads that was Shingashsina. The convenience store with inoperable gas pumps, an ostensibly open community center with one corner of the roof caved in, a tiny post office in an otherwise empty shopfront...and looming over it all, the shattered and hollowed out shell of the church.

They were alone for the moment: Armin’s slick hybrid and Erwin’s reliable-but-expensive SUV would draw too many stares. Eren’s immortal little 97 Lada, whose color was best described as “probably used to be red, once,” was the only car that would be inconspicuous in Shingashina. Erwin and Armin would catch up to them, if Fort Frances had any rental cars available that would pass unnoticed here.

Eren wore the old scarf, nearly the same color as his car, wrapped around his neck again. It mostly covered the key, screwed back together and hanging against his chest on a leather cord he’d found somewhere, in a gesture that seemed more symbolic than practical in Marco’s eyes.

Levi slammed out of the convenience store, muttering to himself in French and carrying a styrofoam cup of burnt-smelling coffee.

“ _Ontario,”_ he stated as he rejoined the boys, as though nothing else could possibly be said on the matter. Then he looked at Eren, and squeezed his shoulder. “You okay, kid?”

Someone had asked Eren if he was okay at least every thirty minutes for the duration of the ten hour drive north. Eren just nodded vaguely every time. His eyes were fixed on the jagged mouth of the church’s shattered window, and in some ways they’d been fixed there ever since his fingers touched the wool of the scarf, two days ago.

“Are _you_ okay?” Jean asked Levi, as though the thought had just occurred to him. Levi shot him a look of quick but genuine surprise, and then he smiled and squeezed Jean’s hand.

“Too soft for your own good, sweetheart.”

 _But you didn’t answer his question,_ Marco thought.

Almost as if he’d heard the thought, Levi turned to look at him, just a quick glance over his shoulder, but long enough for Marco to see the tension in his delicate features, deepening the fine lines that framed his dark eyes.

 _You play his game, but it’s not your first,_ Marco thought again. _You know how this goes because you’ve been a pawn on someone else’s board before, and I can see it because so have I. Is_ that _what you saw in me? Is that what made you look twice when you could have just walked on by..._

 

He’d wondered if there was some kind of plan for entering the shell of the church, but Levi just walked up to a side door and shouldered his way inside. There were a few cars out on the narrow street, but no one spared them a second glance. Eren pulled his scarf up over his nose and followed Levi inside, without apparent hesitation.

Jean glanced at Marco, and then reached out and grabbed his hand. He held on white-knuckle tight as they ducked through the narrow door, and Marco realized with a sting of guilt the shadow this trip cast on Jean as well. Sure enough, as they stepped into the dim gloom of the shattered sanctuary, Jean’s hand came up in a familiar gesture, curling around his right shoulder, over the shield etched into his skin a lifetime ago. Marco shook his fingers loose and, safely out of the public eye, wrapped his arm around Jean’s waist and pulled him close into his side. Jean leaned into him with wordless gratitude, his eyes flicking around the high, moldering rafters.

“Let’s do this fast,” he whispered. “This place isn’t safe.”

 

The shell of the church seemed oddly...untouched, despite the weather damage and the boarded up windows. Eren knelt on the floor behind the warped remains of a cheap wooden altar, and straightened up with a long shard of broken glass in his fingers. It was marbled white under years of grime, a fragment of the shattered window still lying where it had fallen sixteen years ago. He slipped it into a pocket of his coat, unaware or uncaring of his boyfriends’ eyes on him, and moved off around the walls of the sanctuary, looking for basement steps.

True to Armin’s word, the door that hid the basement steps had a big, Victorian-looking wrought-iron lock set in the splintery wood. The bones of this building must be ancient, Marco thought, a hundred years old at least, refurbished and plastered over in ever-cheaper materials as forests were logged out and factories failed and anyone who had the means fled for the cities.

Eren’s fingers curled around the key, but Levi leaned past him and poked the door with two fingers. It swung slowly, jerkily inwards, and then hinges pulled out of rotten wood and the whole thing fell into the stairwell with a sad, wet _whump_ of rot held together with wood pulp. They all laughed at that, and if it was a little strained the brief relief it brought was no less genuine.

“Wait,” Eren said, as Levi hauled the door up out of the stairwell and propped it against the wall. “Just a second...” he turned to Jean, still leaning into Marco’s side, and reached up to cup his hands around his face, stroking his thumbs over Jean’s sharp cheekbones.

“When we go down there, and when we come back, nothing changes,” he whispered, holding Jean’s eyes with his. “ _I love you,_ Jean Kirschtein. I don’t know what we’ll find down there, but I love you and nothing in that basement changes that, whatever it says about you or me.”

Jean loosed his arm from Marco’s waist and curled his fingers over Eren’s, nodding against his hands. “I love you too,” he whispered. “Always, Eren, you know that.”

“I know,” Eren said simply, stretching up on tiptoes to kiss him. “And _you--”_ he let Jean go and rounded on Marco, so suddenly Marco honestly leaned back in surprise, before Eren threw his arms around his neck and hugged him. “ _Thank you,_ Marco. My Marco.”

“ _Our_ Marco,” Jean said, poking Eren in the ribs.”

“Th-thank you? For what?” The question turned itself into a giggle in Marco’s throat as he hugged Eren back.

“ _God_ Bodt, we dump a couple Tarantino movies of tragic backstory on your head, and all you ever ask is _how can I help?”_ Eren shook his head, nuzzling into Marco’s neck for a moment.

 _“_ I love you too,” Eren said, pressing a quick kiss to the underside of Marco’s jaw (it was as high as he could reach, when Marco was standing upright.) “And I’m glad you’re with me, whatever happens.”

 _Eren doesn’t play the game..._ Marco thought, as he bent his head to let Eren kiss him.

 

At the bottom of the basement stairs was...nothing much. Just a room and a few pieces of furniture that could reasonably have been a makeshift doctor’s clinic. A desk which might have once held a long-ago looted computer, some upright filing cabinets, a rolling stool and a long, flat table with a formica top that could be an exam table if you squinted. A lot of mold, and grime, and rubble, and not much else. If there was something they were meant to find...would it have survived sixteen years of water and wind and teenagers on dares?

Eren and Jean explored the desk and the few wall cabinets, while Marco and Levi picked through the files. The rusty cabinets contained a complex strata of mouse nests and a handful of patient files in hanging folders - Armin Artlet and Mikasa Ackerman among them. Growth charts and vaccines and strep throat and sprained ankles...just a pediatrician’s files.

What if there was nothing to find? Marco thought, staring at an account of Thomas Wagner’s broken nose and throwing the folder back into a drawer. What if this was nothing but a place to hide during the riots - the key to the basement, safe and fireproof and hidden underground, what if it was nothing but a goose chase--

“Anything?” Jean asked, leaning over his shoulder, and Marco started, jolted out of his spiraling train of thought.

“Just medical charts, local kids...it doesn’t seem like _anything,”_ Marco’s voice started to rise in frustration, before he realized Jean wasn’t listening to him anymore.

Jean moved him gently out of the way, shut the filing cabinet drawer, and scuffed his toe across the bare cement floor, intent on something under the dust. Then he looked up at Marco with a smirk curling his lips, and dropped to his knees, brushing away dirt and grime.

 _“Honestly,_ send a jock to do a nerd’s job...haven’t any of you ever watched _Tron?”_ He sat back on his heels and blew hard on the floor, clearing a patch of cement marred by a deep scratch...a long arc, in fact, starting from one corner of the filing cabinet and swinging out across the floor.

Jean shoved his slim fingers behind the cabinet and tugged. It moved in a squeal of rust...but instead of sliding it pivoted, one corner dragging as it swung away from the wall on hinges set deep in the stone, dragging through the groove on the floor.

There was a safe set into the wall behind it.

Eren’s key - the second key, the tiny key hidden inside the first - fit the lock, and turned with some coaxing and some multilingual profanity. The interior of the safe was _huge,_ as tall as the filing cabinets and easily twice as deep, and stuffed floor to ceiling with file boxes. Every box was marked with a label, in fading marker: not a word but a drawing. A five-sided shield with an X through the middle, like a pair of crossed swords.

“Admit it, you’d be lost without me,” Jean said with a grin, squishing a brown recluse with his heel as it made a break for the stairs.

Levi rolled his eyes and grabbed the nearest box. He didn’t bother with the desk, just dragging it into a clear patch of floor and flinging the lid off. Paper fluttered - thousands of loose-leaf sheets, some stuffed into folders or clipped together with binder clips, grainy quality with uneven black borders.

“Photocopies,” Levi said, picking up a thick packet. “ _Photocopies..._ if these are records...” He looked from the three boys staring at him to the safe, dozens of boxes, thousands of pages each... “If Grisha made copies of Coat of Arms records...”

“Orders,” Marco said, staring at the safe. “ _Clients._ How they moved the kids, how they communicate, it could all be in there!”

“Could be,” Jean said, and the leaden tone in his voice stopped Marco’s excitement dead in his chest. Jean had picked up a packet himself - it looked like copied pages from an old-fashioned, hand-written ledger, and was scanning the pages with hollow eyes. “Could be, but isn’t.” He gave a bitter snort and started reading aloud in a mocking, singsong voice. “ _Purchase: engagement ring, Russian sapphire set in Gold, Victor Leonhardt, fifteen thousand dollars. Purchase: tiara, rubies in sterling silver. Engagement ring, Rod Reiss, locket, Alana Trembly..._ it’s just jewelry, Marco. It’s useless. It’s nothing.”

Levi turned over the papers in his hands, his own eyes dark. “Shipping manifests. Same shit. Why the _hell--”_

That was as far as he got. Jean threw the pages he was holding with a wordless shout of frustration that made all three of them jump. The clip sprang open against the far wall, raining cheap copier stock down on their heads as Jean balled his hands into fists, shaking.

“ _Why?”_ he snarled, kicking the box on the floor, his toe leaving a long black smudge through the scribbled sword and shield. “Tell me this is a sick joke, _tell me..._ I thought we were coming here for _answers,_ dammit. I--I thought I’d finally know _why..._ I thought something else with that _fucking_ symbol on it would finally tell me why...w-why anyone would _k-kill_ to get me...what made me worth _murder--”_ his voice broke, and Marco caught his hands, pulling him into a hug. He looked desperately to Levi for help as he wrapped his arms around Jean’s trembling shoulders...but Levi wasn’t looking at him.

Levi was looking at Eren. And Eren was kneeling among the scattered pages of the catalogue, his lips moving as he ran a finger down a dense column of names.

“ _Rod Reiss,”_ he said aloud, excitement unmistakeable in his voice. “ _Rod Reiss, engagement ring, purchase for daughter--_ dude. I don’t know what this means, but Rod Reiss did not buy his daughter’s engagement ring.” Marco and Levi just stared at him. “Historia Reiss got cut out of her parent’s _will_ when she got engaged. To her current _wife,_ Ymir. And I _know_ this because I met them both, when they came to Ellsworth Airforce base, to take my class. With their colleague _Mina.”_

They stared at him, then at each other.

“Levi...” Jean said. “When you called the 1-800 number, on those posters in Detroit, what did it turn into?”

Levi smacked a hand to his head with a vicious curse. “Custom gemstone settings. _Made to order.”_

They stared at him, then at each other.

Then Jean tore loose from Marco’s grip and dove back into the safe, dragging out more boxes.

 

There were fourteen file boxes in all, more information than the four of them could ever cover in a sitting, enough information to keep Armin and Erwin buried for weeks...all of it, at face value, the day to day records of a high end custom jewelry business.

There were three boxes with labels other than the “coat of arms,” jammed together right at the back. _Rare Gems._ Something about the phrase made Jean frown to himself, chewing his lip, before he shook his head and dove into the stacks of packets.

Marco’s head began to throb from reading. Sooner or later, he knew, they had to stop, had to pack all this up and find a way to get it out of the church, somewhere safe, somewhere they could really _work..._ but the same mad energy animating Jean had hit all four of them now. They were looking for something, and they hadn’t _found_ it yet.

He’d been staring at the same line on a form for fifteen minutes without reading it, head swimming from strain and the close, musty basement air. _Point of acquisition North Korea. Point of acquisition North Korea. Point of acquisition North Korea._

_North Korea--_

Marco’s fuzzy brain finally kicked to life. _North Korea._ He tore back to the first page of the packet, looking for a product description --

“Jean,” said Marco softly. “What was your...the woman who...” he bit his lip, and blurted, “What was your mother’s name?”

Jean gave him a long, searching look, his glasses shoved up in his hair and his nose smudged with dust. “Rose,” he answered quietly.

Marco looked back down, and read aloud. “ _Very rare Asian sapphire, no fixed setting, malleable. Point of Acquisition: North Korea. Finish and h-handling...finish and handling...Rose Palmer.”_

“ _Fuck_ me...” Eren whispered. “North Korean Asian sapphire. Fuck me, Marlowe. It’s Marlowe.”

“ _We both had an excellent teacher, after all...”_ Jean whispered.

Eren dug through the nearest Rare Gems box and surfaced holding another catalog, scanning down the lines as fast as he could read once again.

“ _Very rare...”_ he read aloud, bile on every word. “ _Amber Parisian sapphire in Korean silver setting. High finishing potential, h-high--”_ he stopped and took a deep breath, like he was choking on the words as he said them. “ _High resale value.”_

Jean just stared at him with a sort of eerie, deadly calm. “What’s the reference number?”

Eren swallowed hard. “1046.”

All four of them dove back into the Rare Gem boxes, digging through loose pages paperclipped together, crinkling and fragile and disorganized with age. _Please let me find it,_ Marco thought desperately, scanning numbers. _Please let one of us find it before Jean--_

And then Jean’s laughter split the moldy silence, tearing the air harsh and wrong as a bomb blast. His head bent over the copy of an intricate certificate in his hand, and his narrow shoulders shook as he laughed.

 _“Jean--”_ Marco got to him a second before Eren, braced both hands on his shoulders and tried to get his boyfriend to meet his eyes.

“All those years I spent wondering why. Why why _why fuckin’ why...what made me worth killing for?”_ Jean said, mocking himself between heavy gulps of laughter. Marco looked from him to the packet of papers in his hand, _amber Parisian sapphire in Korean silver setting._ “He _told_ me,” Jean said, running a hand across his face. “He fucking _told_ me..” he thrust the documents at Marco and tapped his finger beneath one amber eye. “ _One rare gem to another,_ Jesus...” He dropped back to his heels, laughing again, let his head flop back so he was staring up at the cracked gray ceiling overhead. “ _Why would anyone kill to get to me?_ Same reason anyone would kill to get to anything. Same reason we’ve been killing since someone dreamed up an economy.” He leaned over Marco with another cracked laugh and jerked a certificate out of the middle of the packet, shoving it back into his hand hard enough to crinkle the ragged paper. “ _I was worth a lot of money.”_

The paper in Marco’s hand was a bill of sale, _amber Parisian sapphire in Korean silver setting._ There was no buyer’s name, just a seal...it must have been a real wax seal on the actual document. On a photocopy it was nothing but a blob of grainy light and dark, but the shape was still visible: a simple coat of arms, a shield and two crossed swords in an X through the middle. The price listed in neat type-face was less than a million dollars. But not a lot less.

There _was_ a name at the bottom of the bill, a signature and a printed name, on a line marked _For Sale By--._ The signature was illegible, a crabbed and hasty swirl of ink over thick paper.

The printed name was Cecil Kirschtein.

 


	9. Last Man Standing

He’d forgotten how completely the rural world shut down on a Sunday night.

Levi walked most of a mile to find a gas station with a clerk in. At least the bored, sleepy-looking kid, behind a barred counter with a cracked glass top, didn’t complain about his American dollars, or bother with an ID. Money was money in an end-of-the-world town like Shingashina.

He hadn’t smoked in years. It was easier to ignore the pangs of nicotine addiction with a kid or two sharing the air around you, but something about this place brought the cravings back with a vengeance.

He stopped to light up in the street light-spider webbed shadow of the church, mostly out of habit. It was about the only place in town that blocked the wind on these nights when the cold blew straight down out of the arctic.

Levi leaned back against the cold stone, staring up at the stars. The lime plant at the edge of town poured its plumes of smoke across the sky, blocking out a column of stars above the church’s moldering bell tower.

 _Just stand here,_ he thought, _just stand right here rookie._ He took a deep draft of smoke and held it in until the nicotine male his head go dizzy. _That’s all you have to do,_ voices from the past that echoed much to clear under the smoky stars in Shingashina.

 _Just stay by the church and give us a nod when the street’s all good and clear. You only have to nod. They’ll never trace it back to you, never trace it back to any of us. We’re not gonna hurt anyone, just blow in the window. Just make the people who_ belong _here start thinking. Make ‘em see the change comin’ down._

See the change comin’ down, and what was there to see in the end? A big bright light that blows your life wide open and this little creature, this little ball of love and heat and blood that falls right into your open arms.  


Levi shivered hard, hugging himself against the wind. He shut his eyes, and for once in his life stopped trying to block out the old memory, too-big helmet shifting on his head as he nodded, the blast of light and the rain of glass as the window shattered…and after the roar, fading in after the ringing in his ears ran out, the screaming began, behind the walls. A child screaming, not the piercing wail of a baby seeking attention, but the harsh, guttural choking of a child, in real, serious pain.

He stayed there as the chill of the stones leeched through his coat, until the cheap cigarette scorched his fingers with an acrid puff of burning filter, and he dropped it with a curse, frozen breath mixing with the last of the smoke.

 

The hotel on the edge of Shingashina was a tiny, fluorescent lit and tobacco scented affair, clinging to life on the meager tourism of the Sioux reservation and the nearby national forest. Erwin worried, as Erwin always did that they’d be too conspicuous there, but the First Nations seal on Eren’s drivers license took care of that. An Indian clerk would be slow to talk about an Indian guest, even if he was an out-of-towner.

He blew through the lobby with his head down, hands deep his pockets to hide the shaking. When he hesitated outside the boys’ room destructive old instincts screamed at the stillness, stillness made you stick out stillness left you exposed stillness left time for things to catch up stillness wasn’t running and running’s what he _does--_ but there are forces that overrule the strongest of survival instincts, and sixteen years of fatherhood is one of them.

 The splintery door was propped open by the deadbolt, which definitely wasn’t like Jean...but when he nudged the door open with a soft knock Jean was curled up tight and dead to the world, his face half buried in Marco’s stomach. Eren was a burrito of blankets on Marco’s other side, holding tight to Jean’s hand. He was only vaguely surprised to see Armin sitting on the floor at the foot of the single queen they’d all packed into, eyes intent on his laptop and fingers moving in a blur.

Only Marco looked up to meet his eyes, the arm around Jean’s back tightening protectively at the soft movement of the door. He took in Levi’s tousled hair and windburned cheeks and the cigarette smoke clinging to his clothes, and Levi watched the walls go up behind those big brown eyes. He realized what he must look like to Marco’s ever-perceptive eyes, a mess of jagged edges too sharp and unpredictable to be allowed close   to the already torn up boys curled up at his side.

He wasn’t expecting it when Marco smiled softly and jerked his head to the side, towards the room Levi and Erwin shared. _I’ll take care of them. You take care of you._

_It happens to everyone, I suppose. Your kids find someone they need more than you._

He lingered a moment longer, just to watch the kids sleep. The fluorescent tube above the bed flickered, throwing the fine lines at the corners of Jean’s eyes into ugly relief. _God only knows I’ve earned it, but can’t you give my kids the chance to rest?_

 

He’d half wondered (and maybe hoped) that Erwin would be asleep when he returned. Their room was dark, except for the pulsing glow of Erwin’s laptop balanced on the tiny table in the corner. Working. Because of course he was.

“Still waiting on an answer from Hanji,” he said, as if Levi had been there all night. As though he hadn’t even noticed the cigarette smoke clinging to his clothes. “But we’ll clean out the rest of the vault tomorrow morning. Not an ideal setup, but at least Jean can make a _start_ at indexing until we can properly digitize--”

“You don’t think maybe Jean needs a--”

“I haven’t been able to turn up anything on Mikasa myself, but Hanji’s the person for that anyway,” Erwin went on without a break. “I need to know how they found Eren, if there’s a crack in our covering--”

“ _Erwin,”_ Levi cut him off, surprised himself at the knife edge tremor in his voice. “Would it kill you, just once in awhile to...to _pretend_ you’re a-- a goddamned human being and not a robot incapable of love?”

Erwin’s lips parted slightly, but that was the only outward sign he gave of surprise. He stood and crossed the tiny room slowly, almost cautiously. He touched Levi’s shoulder. Levi shivered but didn’t pull away, and Erwin reached out to wrap his arms around him.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, long fingers gently cradling the back of Levi’s head and stroking down his neck. “I’m sorry.” And Levi could almost hate himself for how easily he melted into his arms.

He stretched up to tangle his fingers in Erwin’s soft hair, tugging him down for a maybe-too-hard kiss. Erwin’s arm settled warm and heavy around his waist, taking as much weight as Levi would allow him to support. He didn’t pull away until Levi did, bringing up both hands to cradle his face. His wedding ring was a tiny point of coldness against Levi’s cheek.

“I’m sorry,” he said one more time, pressing one more kiss to Levi’s lips, and Levi sighed and wrinkled his nose, covering Erwin’s hands with his and leaning their foreheads together.

“You were just being you.”

“That’s why I’m sorry,” Erwin replied with a soft little sound that wanted to be a laugh, and wasn’t. Levi huffed and hugged him, burying his face in the crook of his shoulder.

“Kids?” Erwin asked.

“Puppy pile,” Levi shrugged. “They’ll be OK. I think.”

“And you?” Erwin’s fingers dipped into the pocket of Levi’s coat, pulling out the cigarette pack still in its torn cellophane. He’d noticed the smoke. Because of course he had.

“I can’t stop thinking,” Levi whispered, feeling the tremor in his voice again. “Can’t stop thinking...why the church? The Titans wanted a big show, so why not the lime plant, or the train depot, any of the factories. Why the old church no one gave a shit about? Why the fucking church, unless he _knew?”_

 _“_ Kenny?” Erwin asked, and Levi’s teeth ground together at the sound of the name.

“You weren’t here long enough to get it, how deep the rot went. Cops, military, doctors... _everyone._ Those Regiment Zero monsters and the Titans of Man...fuck, most of Regiment Zero _were_ the Titans of Man. Those shitheads had a hand in anything sick and broken that ever happened here...there’s no way they weren’t in with a machine that moves money like Coat of Arms does. They’d roll out the red carpet for that operation.” His eyes stung, his cheeks and throat and lungs, all of it scraped raw by wind and guilt and smokey poison cold that was Shingashina air.

“So why the church, unless they knew? Unless they knew there was something in Grisha Jaeger’s basement and the riots were the perfect chance to blow it all to hell.”

He pulled away, feeling Erwin’s eyes still on him, fists clenched so tight his knuckles cracked, and the words on his tongue tasted as cancerous as cigarette smoke.

“And I told him when to light the fucking fuse.”

* * *

 

A big black SUV didn’t blend in when you drove it through a place like Shingashina, but it had uses. It didn’t blend in, but it _did_ look official. With a few modifications.

“It’s like driving a rhinoceros,” Eren muttered, swinging through another mud-puddle on a narrow, rain-stained gravel road near the lime plant.

In the passenger seat, Armin winced as a wave of muddy water added another layer to their camouflaging grime. “Are you _quite_ finished?”

“Are you kidding? I haven’t found anywhere to do donuts yet.”

Armin glared, and Eren grinned at the windshield and swung the big car back around towards Shingashina.

“C’mon, it’s necessary,” he said, slowing to a crawl down the narrow main street and nudging the SUV next to the curb outside the church.  “Only lawyers keep their cars that clean.” He killed the engine and flipped around to rummage  in the back seat. “Contractors _definitely_ don’t.” He tossed Armin a hard hat and a safety-yellow reflector vest.

“I can’t believe you travel with construction costumes,” Armin muttered, slapping the too-big hat onto his head and hiding his long hair under the band.

“Best decoy in the known universe.” Eren locked the SUV and pulled a roll of caution tape out of his pocket. “That and janitors.” He slapped a black-and-yellow X of tape across the doors of the church - usually more than enough to deter the casual snoop, provided they didn’t come close enough to notice the tape read CAUTION: TOO HOT, HOT DAMN.

“Hey, short notice okay,” Eren said in response to Armin’s loud snort, pulling a carton dolly out of the back of the SUV.

“And what are you going to say if someone notices?”

“Hey, short notice okay?” Eren grinned again. “Come on, let’s clean this place out before someone notices us.” 

* * *

 

Jean awoke to cloudy daylight filtering through the curtains and the zipper of Marco’s open fleece jacket digging into his face. He considered moving for a long, sleepy moment, and then grumbled to himself and simply shifted enough to spread the zipper-prints around his face a little.

“Mornin,’” Marco said, lifting the arm over Jean’s back as he shifted and mumbled. He set his book face down on the comforter and ran his freed hand gently through Jean’s tousled hair.

“Mmmm _no.”_

Marco chuckled. “There’s still coffee if you want any.”

“Hmnmoving.”

“Is that so.”

Jean humphed and burrowed deeper into the soft fleece against his cheek. “ _This’s my home ‘n I’m never leaving.”_

 _“Shinga--”_ Marco stopped mid-word and rolled his eyes. “You’re talking about my sweater, aren’t you.”

“Am one with th’fluff.”

Marco shook his head and settled his arm around Jean’s waist again, picking up his book.

“Mnf...where’seren.”

“He and Armin went back to the church early. Clean out the vault before anyone gets nosy. He said to let you sleep...you went out pretty hard last night.”

Jean cracked an eye and peered up at Marco, realizing they were both fully dressed and curled up on top of the made bed. He propped himself up on an elbow and squirmed a little further up Marco’s chest, squinting at his boyfriend’s pale face in the early light.

“You sleep at all?”

Marco shrugged one shoulder, and Jean cocked his head and snuggled closer, leaning up enough to press a quick kiss to the corner of Marco’s mouth.

“You wanna talk?”

Marco shut his eyes, book dropping back to the comforter. It was a long moment before he shook his head, almost imperceptibly.

“’kay.” Jean wrapped his arms around Marco’s neck and nuzzled close. After a moment, Marco shivered and rolled to face him, sliding his arms around Jean’s waist and pulling his sleep-warm body into a tight hug. Jean hummed and nudged his nose against Marco’s ever-so-slightly sandpapery cheek, letting himself be snuggled.

“Love you,” he murmured, and Marco squeezed him tighter, hiding his face in Jean’s hair.

“I love you too...you okay, beautiful?”

Jean nodded, although he didn’t stop nuzzling into Marco’s chest.

“You sure?”

Jean went still for a moment, but he nodded again. “I’m with you two, I’m ok.” He knew from the way Marco held on to him, just shy of clinging, that it was pointless to ask if _he_ was ok. If he wanted to talk, he’d talk...but whatever was weighing on his mind wasn’t ready to come out yet, whatever the reason. Better to just let himself be Marco’s teddy bear, silent and unconditional comfort, than to push him.

Marco’s fingers paused in their stroking up and down through Jean’s hair, and he tipped his head curiously. “What’s this?” he asked, tugging on the slim silver chain around Jean’s neck.

Jean half-smiled, tugging a plain, tarnished house key on a chain out from under his shirt. “’S kind of dumb...Levi got me a key on a chain when he first brought me home from Detroit. So I could wear it and know the door wasn’t gonna lock behind me again...” He ran his thumb over the worn edge of the key, where the thin silver plating had worn through to tarnished brass. “I used to stand on the porch and lock and unlock the door for hours.” Marco winced and squeezed his shoulders. “I usually break it out when we travel, or when Eren’s away, or you...” his smile took on a self-deprecating edge. “It’s a reminder, I guess...that there’s something we’re all gonna come back to.”

Marco touched his hand, and when Jean didn’t object he picked up the key himself, turning it between his fingers.

“Something to come back to...I like that.” Jean blushed, burrowing back into his shoulder. “I’ve always liked the shape of keys...” he pressed the key on the end of its chain to his chest, close to the edge of his tattoos and traced a finger around the outline. “What’cha think? Good addition?”

Jean looked up, watching Marco’s face carefully as he bit his lip in thought. “That’s...pretty permanent.”

“Suppose it is.” Marco shrugged, running his fingers across the tattoos on his chest. “There’s not enough of you two in here. Been looking for something like this...something of you I can wear. Carry with me, y’know?”

Jean’s arms tightened around his waist. “Sounds a little like a wedding ring.”

Marco kissed his hair, hugging him back just as tight.

“Suppose it does.”

Warm, comforting silence descended. Every muscle in Jean’s body felt relaxed, blissful, sinking into Marco’s warmth beneath him and the tranquil air--

Which was promptly shattered by the door flying open hard enough to slam against the wall.

“It is _precisely_ 9:37 in the morning, you have wasted _all_ the best parts of the day!” Eren declared, dropping the file boxes in his arms with a reverberating _thump._ “Up! Awaken! Elevate! _Arise!”_

 _“_ There should be laws against morning people,” Jean muttered into Marco’s shoulder. In the doorway behind Eren, Armin nodded fervently.

“ _Yip yip!”_

Marco snagged a spare pillow and heaved it overarm at Eren, who caught it and sent it back with a spin.

“Eren, your phone’s going off,” Armin said mechanically, ducking out of the way of a returning projectile.

Eren batted the pillow out of the air and snagged his phone, casting a cursory glance at the screen.

“Huh. Unregistered.”

“Don’t _answer it--”_ Jean started, as Eren swiped his thumb across the lock screen

“H’lo?”

“ _Hi, Eren.”_

If the tinny voice on the other end of the call wasn’t enough, the way Eren froze absolutely solid told the whole story. Jean sat up, suddenly wide awake, all of them staring at Eren’s phone.

“Hi...hi, Mina.”

“I told you I’d be in touch,” she said, and to Eren’s ear it sounded like she was trying to smile “I wasn’t sure if you’d...remember me.”

“It’s only been a week. “ _Of course I remember you._ Eren’s mind raced ahead of the next line. She has to hide her moves, she’s just touching in with a friend, it has to sound _normal,_ does she know where we are...

 _“_ Feels longer, doesn’t it?” _I thought you were dead_

Eren squeezed his eyes shut until stars popped behind his eyelids. It shouldn’t be him having this conversation. It should be Jean, or Armin, not him he’d never learned to think like this, layers and layers of meanng under every innocuous word.

_Why are you calling me now, why are you talking like this? What are you trying to tell me (why can’t you tell me, who cares who talks to a sign language teacher?)_

“Did you make it _home_ okay?” There was a hint of Mina brightness in her voice, and the slightest little emphasis on _home..._

“Yeah, we’re--” On the bed, Jean shook his head frantically, slicing a finger across his throat. _Not we, not us, don’t say Jean’s name “_ I’m at...at my dad’s place. Just for a couple days. To pick up some stuff, you know?”

“ _Finally.”_ When she laughed she sounded like Mina again, but now he’d learned to hear the edge of fakeness in that voice.

“I’ll tell Tori, she’ll be thrilled. You’re meeting her and Nick in Toronto next week, right?” _Tori..._

 _“_ I’ll follow where she leads.”

“Quick study,” Mikasa said with a chuckle.

“Are you gonna be there?” Eren blurted. “When...I wanna meet up, when will I get to see you again?”

The silence on the other end lasted just a little too long.

“I guess it depends. You’ll have to ask Nick when you see him. Bye, Eren. It’s always good to hear your voice.”

Eren stared at his dead phone for a long time after she hung up, three sets of eyes boring into him from all sides of the room. There were a thousand words all tangled in his mind, but only one made it to the surface.

“ _Who,”_ he asked the room at large, “in the _hell,_ is _Nick?”_

* * *

“So who’s Tori Reiss, and why are we following where she leads?” Jean asked, lying back on his bed and staring up at the ceiling. The rest of the comforter not occupied by him was a sea of documents. Armin and Marco had paper puddles of their own in various corners of the floor, and Erwin and Levi had commandeered the hotel room’s tiny desk, heads together over Erwin’s iPad.

“She came to South Dakota with Mikasa and her wife,” Eren said with a shrug. “Some kind of...educator, I think, she talked a lot about child psychology. I thought if ‘Mina’s’ service records were fabricated--”

“Oh, Tori Reiss is legit,” Erwin said with a smirk, sliding his iPad across the desk. “Hanji just got back to me. She’s got a service record, she’s just...not quite who she said she was.”

Eren picked up the tablet and stared at the open file - attached to an email from Hanji, and topped by an ID photo of Tori Reiss’ angelic face.

“AFOIS? You’re _kidding.”_

Marco and Jean both looked blank. “Air Force Office of Investigative Services,” Erwin explained. “It mean’s she--”

“She’s a _cop,”_ Eren was almost laughing as he tossed the iPad down to the bed. “Tori Reiss is a _cop.”_

 _“_ Special Agent, to be precise,” Erwin said, and his smile got a few molars wider. “She’s a special agent and she’s got something on Coat of Arms.”

“Nick?” Eren asked. Out of the corner of his eye he watched Jean pick up Erwin’s iPad, frowning deeply at the screen.

“The only Nick I can think of from back then” Levi said slowly, brows knit with recollection “was a pastor from some mega-church in Toronto.” He shut his eyes and dragged a hand down his face. “I always did wonder why some big shot pastor did so much wining and dining in a shithole like Shingashina.” He shook his head and threw a sidelong glance at Erwin. “ _God_ you’re creepy when you get excited.”

“I don’t like this,” Jean said softly still staring at the file on the tablet screen. Marco’s eyes flicked to him for a second, but no one else seemed to hear him.

“--put out some feelers, we must know _someone_ who’s run across Special Agent Reiss,” Erwin was saying, throwing on his coat as he stood. he looked around for his iPad, and held out his hand, still talking to levi. Jean pushed the tablet into his hand, plastic casing clicking against Erwin’s wedding band, and went back to staring at his lap.

“I’ll find out what Pastor Nick’s been up to in the Capitol,” Levi said, already thumbing through contacts on his phone.

“ _I don’t like this.”_

“If AFOIS found an excuse to snatch him up--”

Erwin nodded sharply. “If a Fed managed to grab him in Canada it wasn’t for something small. It’ll be out there even if they kept it out of the news. Arlert!”

Armin snapped to attention from his place leaning comfortably into Eren’s side, his face instantly expressionless and professional.

“There was something in those boxes Agent Reiss wants. Dive in. I want your best guess of what it is. Use Jean--” Erwin looked to Jean and seemed to actually see him for the first time, hunched up on the end of the bed. “...when he’s ready,” he finished, after a momentary hesitation.

He headed out the door, Levi close on his heels. Armin hesitated a second longer, looking from Eren to Jean, and then his mask slipped back into place and he followed Erwin and Levi out the door.

Jean clenched his fingers white-knuckle tight in his lap. “ _Rat in a trap,”_ he whispered, staring at his shaking hands. “ _Rat in a trap, rat in a trap...”_

“Jean? Love?” Marco slipped off the bed and came to kneel in front of him covering Jean’s tangled hands with his own. “What’s wrong?”

Jean grunted and twitched him off hunching up tighter. Marco raised his hands, but he didn’t retreat, searching JEan’s hidden face. “C’mon love, talk to me. What’s wrong?”

“ _Everything.”_ Jean’s voice was still quiet, but the word came out with a bite. “All of this, it’s all wrong.” Eren tilted his head, eyes worried, and came to kneel beside Marco.

“Jean,” he said carefully. “Tori and Mikasa just gave us the biggest break we’ve ever had against Coat of Arms.”

“They didn’t give use _shit.”_ Eren’s eyes widened, and Marco rocked back on his heels at the venom in Jean’s voice. “They _used_ us, why don’t either of you get that? Tori Reiss is a cop, she’s gotta toe the line so she used _us_ to play dirty.”

“If Erwin’s right, she’s after Coat of Arms too,” Eren said, heat creeping in at the edge of his words. We’re on the same side.”

“ _Sure_ we are.” Jean snorted. “And I’m sure she’d be right on that phone to help if you’d gotten arrested for trespassing this morning.”

“You think I can’t bullshit my way around some small-town cops, Kirschtein?”

“You shouldn’t _have_ to,” Jean snapped, springing off the bed. Marco fell back on one hand, but Eren scrambled to his feet, nose to nose with his taller boyfriend. “None of us should be here, none of us ever should’ve gone down in that basement. She _played_ us! She gave you that key and sent you runnin’ straight back to Shingashina like a good little corpse dog to dig up the shit that should’ve _stayed buried--”_ His voice broke and he spun away, nervous furious energy vibrating through every inch of his body.

Eren, in contrast, had gone very still, eyes too wide against his dark skin. Neither one of them spared a glance for Marco, still on the floor beside the bed, knees clutched against his chest.

“You never would’ve known--” Eren began.

“Who says I _wanted_ to know?” Jean spun back, fists clenching. I could’ve spent a whole happy life thinking I was kidnapped, not...not _pawned_ like a gold necklace. I could’ve gone on thinking I had _parents_ who _loved me--”_

“And I could’ve gone on thinking Mikasa was _dead!”_ Eren yelled, anger and frustration finally breaking through his voice. “That she died in the fucking church _I_ draggeed her into! You want me to trade that -- you want _Armin_ to trade that -- so you can go back to blissful ignorance?”

“How would I know?” Jean’s hands lashed out so fast Eren reared back with a gasp, and Jean’s f ingers clenched in his shirt, dragging them together nose to nose. “How would I know what she is to you, you never _told_ me! You left her out of anything you ever said about this place and you want me to tell _you_ what losing her was like? Like I’m just supposed to _know?”_

“ _Don’t you know everything?”_ Eren exploded. “Whenever things go wrong for us it’s always _I told you so you never listen--”_

“Because you _never listen!_ Why listen to _me_ when it’s going bad, huh?” Jean shook with frustration and anger, tears clinging to the corners of his eyes. “Who cares if Jean’s scared he’s always scared of everything, who cares if I get _shot--”_

He knew the second the words left his mouth, the second the frustration in Eren’s eyes broke and crumbled and bloomed into hurt, that he’d pushed it just a step too far. He was suddenly aware of his shaking muscles and sweaty skin, and his fingers slipped limply off Eren’s shirt as Eren stepped back.

“ _Who cares?”_ he asked, voice barely a whisper. Jean flinched at the hurt in his voice, and they stared at each other in the suddenly ringing silence.

“ _Don’t...”_

Jean and Eren stared at each other, hurt bleeding into confusion, and then they gasped in concert and spun to find Marco, curled in on himself at the foot of the bed.

“ _Don’t,”_ he whispered through the tears streaming down his cheeks, hands pressed over his ears and clutching at his hair, rocking himself with every repetition. “ _Don’t don’t don’t don’t...”_

Jean and Eren were on him in an instant, their own argument forgotten as they scrambled to his side.

“Marco, Marco baby--” Eren’s knees burned as he dropped hard to the carpet, reaching out to catch Marco’s hands in his. Marco whimpered, shoulders still shaking with the sobs strangling his voice.

“ _Don’t fight don’t fight, not you, don’t...”_

“Marco, it’s okay...it’s _okay,_ we’re fine, we’re not -- baby, look at me,” Eren pleaded, nudging his nose against Marco’s sticky cheeks. Jean snuggled against Marco’s side, kissing his hair as he stroked whatever he could reach. Marco barely seemed to hear them through the fog of his panic attack, but he responded to the touch, reaching out to catch Eren’s shoulders.

“Don’t fight, not you two...if you’re...I _can’t...”_

“We’re _fine,_ beautiful, it’s okay--”

“We’re sorry!” Jean blurted over him. “ _I’m_ sorry, to both of you, I’m so sorry, I’m _so sorry.”_

Eren met his eyes, over Marco’s head buried in his shoulder, and reached out to squeeze Jean’s hand.

“Me too, angel,” he whispered, before he turned his head to nuzzle into Marco’s hair. “Hey, hey kiwi, you with us?”

“I’m scared,” Marco mumbled into his shoulder. “I’m scared, Eren, I’m so scared...”

“Of what? C’mon baby, look at me...”

“I’ve never seen you two _fight_ before,” Marco whispered, voice trembling. “Long as I’ve been here, you’ve always just _loved_ each other so damn much, I never thought there was a thing that could split you apart...”

Jean and Eren stared at each other, and Jean just barely managed to turn an extremely innapropriate laugh into an explosive snort.

“Never fight.”

“ _Us.”_

“You would’ve _hated_ us in high school,” Jean said, shaking his head. Marco blinked between his boyfriends, bloodshot eyes wide and confused.

“This was about a weekly occurrence when we were teenagers,” Eren said, rolling his eyes. “Levi used to threaten to mail us both to Australia. I guess it _has_ been awhile...”

“But you’re okay,” Marco whispered.

“We’re okay,” Jean said, taking his hands with a smile. “It’s just...it’s stress overload. We get in each other’s faces and yell and snap, and then someone goes one step too far and we both burst into tears and snuggle for the rest of the day. Probably not the _healthiest_ form of stress relief...but yeah, we’re _okay.”_

 _“_ I’ve never seen you...like that...”

“We don’t butt heads so much with you around,” Eren smiled, nuzzling a kiss to the corner of Marco’s mouth. “You’re so good for us...”

Marco sniffled and burrowed into his neck, curling up against the smaller man’s chest.

“Hey.” Jean leaned into Marco’s side, reaching under his shirt with his free hand. Marco blinked up at him, and Eren’s eyes widened as Jean pulled his housekey on its chain off over his head, and pressed it into Marco’s hand. “You take this, Marco. To remind you.”

Marco stared at the little silver key in his palm, and then flung his arms around Jean’s neck and squeezed hiim against his chest. Jean wheezed happily as Marco koalaed him, and Eren chuckled, leaning forward to kiss Marco’s hair.

“Do you need to go help Armin?”

“ _No,”_ Jean said flatly, fishing out his phone and tapping out a one-handed message. “ _Armin_ doesn’t need to help Armin right now. We _all_ need a break, and a good twelve hours of cuddling. And no more _goddamned_ bombshells.”

 

_“You didn’t tell Jean yet, did you?” Armin asked, trailing Levi down the stairs. “About the other name.”_

_Levi shook his head sharply. “I’ve got Hanji on it. I don’t want Jean to know until we’re_ sure... _not after all he’s been through...”_

 _Armin nodded. “Fair ‘nuff...we can’t go telling him we found his birth mother and be_ wrong.”


End file.
